INTERFACE

REVIEW

Decadence, Decay and the Demimonde

20 Portman Square and 92 George Street, London
13 October – 11 November

Reviewed by: Theron Schmidt »

Just off Baker Street with its designer furniture stores and phone boxes filled with sex ads, I find the first exhibition from newly formed Austin Enterprises. Titled ‘Decadence, Decay and the Demimonde’, the exhibition transferred to this temporary space after its Frieze-timed launch at Home House (former site of the Courtauld Institute). Walking into this single room on George Street, I immediately regret having missed seeing the work in its original, opulent environment, which the catalogue describes as having inspired the exhibition in the first place. Here, most of the heavy hitters loaned to fill out the original exhibition are absent. The work that’s left, only just fitting inside the space, ranges widely from Francesca Lowe’s large canvases of surreal ink drawings to Jaap de Vries’ leering, life-sized cast of himself in eerie black synthetic material to Sam Jury’s looping video showing otherworldly faces imperceptibly morphing between ages and genders. While the original exhibition may have been designed to make a statement, it’s hard to escape the feeling that what now links together this disparate collection is (understandably enough) the desire to make a sale.

The chaotic, overwhelming feeling of the collection as a whole also characterises much of the work: there’s an unrestrained, tumescent energy running through the room. Sometimes this is obviously manifested in literal depictions of decay and decadence, as in Juno Doran’s dreamy portraits of nightlife denizens, or in the rotting fruit and pig’s head in Heather and Ivan Morison’s photographic still lifes. But it’s the form as much as the content of Anna Genger’s paintings which reflects this profligate energy, as tassels, pods, and corpuscular explosions of glittery shapes emerge from dense, vegetative textures. Her larger works lose some of the intensity of her smaller paintings, but still there is something engrossing about their attention to surfaces themselves as sites of degradation and depravity.

Gengler’s paintings make me more aware of the surface quality of the other work. In Emi Avora’s painting Lightcapsule, for example, a grandly decorated reception room and stairwell melts into a single, shimmering texture of opulent shades of green. Looking at Julie Verhoeven’s Ver-onica, a folding screen on which contemporary figures are sketched over a background of Victorian illustrations, I wonder about the extent to which culture is formed on gents’ room walls. Similarly, there’s a wallpaper feel to the silkscreen-style assemblage of images of sex, death, and décor that is the catalogue cover, also available as a limited edition print. Finally, some of the strongest works consist of nothing but surface, such as Annabelle Moreau’s treated aluminium panels or Paul Hazelton’s skin-like fusion of pigment, dust, and paper.

But there’s another side to these explorations of surfaces. While I’m in the gallery, marketing and sponsorship director James Austin points out the ways that Genger’s sequins or Avora’s vivid colours catch the light, and describes how launch party attendees stayed late into the night drinking punch and staring transfixed at Jury’s slowly changing video. His amicable chatter is a reminder that these works are not only reflections of the indulgent world they portray, but also aim to be part of that world, to adorn the walls of the rich and decadent. Co-curator Ben Austin writes in the catalogue that the demimonde is a subculture of those who “recognise the futility of it all”, and “do not campaign against climate change nor... march against unjust wars... . They just want to play and let the devil be damned.” It’s not surprising that this show celebrates this attitude more than it critiques it, since it is, after all, the attitude of its target market.

Writer detail:
Theron is a writer and performer based in London. His writing focuses on relational aesthetics, theatricality, and the ethics of representation. He was selected for Writing from Live Art (www.liveartuk.org/writingfromliveart), a Live Art UK initiative, and his critical writing has been published in AN Magazine, Dance Theatre Journal, The Live Art Almanac, Platform, Real Time (Australia), and Total Theatre.

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