Oxford, Paris, and other things

A very impressive first exhibition of the first art competition organised by artspool.net who used last year's participants as the selecting panel. The winning artists, chosen from online documentation only, were then invited to do the 2010 artweeks My favourite of them all was probably Jemma Watts , I absolutely loved the many different facets of her techniques with her subjects, Binge 1 and 6 (unfortunately not for sale or perhaps it is fortunate because you wouldn't know where to put this in your house, a museum would be better) are made of a mix of photocopy and coloured pencil representing women -or are they just plain monsters you could see on the side of hell of a jugdement scene made by the ancient masters like Bosch ? The contrast between the blur of the photocopied background and the precision of the pencil' texture is fantastic. The style? Bacon meets the Berlin underground cabaret world of the late twenties... Just after this, a scene one could see in hell...

AFTERBURN, The Studios , 30b Henley Street Emily Alexander, Jaya Mansberger, Philip Marston, Sam Race. Sam Race's most recent works Because of all we've seen and The love letter come from collecting images of furniture from the internet and making sense of them by representing them together, somehow it is about reappropriating the foreign. There is a lot of tenderness and intimacy in the texture: their size and technique as well as using oil on board are reminiscent of the past Burgundian and Flemish masters. Having just come back from the Brookes’ end of year students’ exhibition , it was interesting to compare these two paintings with the LOL installation as they all are a response to the virtual world, one using traditional material (oil on wood), the other being an installation. LOL (Laugh out loud) is a series of open laptop computers, each showing 'funny' videos from youtube. It is both touching and scary, perhaps reflective on what Baudrillard could have writ...

But where on earth is Ernest? He's gone missing, it's official. Chris ... what have you done with him? You murderer!