Street artist Fanakapan recently completed series of murals in the streets of East London. Using a shiny silver inflatable 3D style, the artist painted a silver balloon dog, a duo of clown characters holding a smiley balloon , and a tribute to Peanuts fictional characters by Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip featuring a flying helium balloon of the bird Woodstock and Snoopy.
Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is currently showing a solo exhibition ‘ π, e, ø,’ organised with Olivier Renaud-Clement at Almine Rech Gallery in London
Ryoji Ikeda has gained a reputation as a unique artist working across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visual materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.
The exhibition title π, e, ø stands for three important mathematical constants;
π (pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter)
e (the base of the natural logarithm)
ø (phi, golden ratio: a+b/a = a/b), all of which are infinite.
The show focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and aesthetics.
Through the use of mathematical vocabulary, the artist seeks to present infinity in a visual way.
The works on paper, multiple variations of 1×1 surfaces of white and black from series of numbers, the transcendental and the irrational, are exhaustively visualised in decimal expressions reaching 1.25 million digits a piece. These signs are beyond the limits of human comprehension or experience, and must be taken for wonders — apparitions of ominous and numinous beauty. A restrained elegance and minimalism reigns throughout, but the monochromatic surfaces belie the furious richness and staggering detail within.
Works from Ryoji Ikeda’s time and space series, which convert the notion of Time onto 2-dimensional surfaces (Space), are presented together with works from the test pattern series that refers to the mathematical constants π, e, ø and uses colors which are developed during the colour separation process of 16mm film.
More silent epiphanies are present in related works that elegantly visualise silence and time. 0’10” shows the numerical countdown from 10 to 0 that precedes films, making physically manifest the immaterial and temporal notion of ten seconds of 16mm film. Similarly, the work 4’33’, which consists of the physical equivalent of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of blank 16mm film with time code, clearly references John Cage’s hugely philosophical meditation on the impossibility of silence.
data.scan [nº1-9] is part of Ryoji Ikeda’s ongoing datamatics project (2006-) in which he explores the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data which permeates our world. It is a series of experiments in various forms – audiovisual concerts, installations, publications and CD releases – that seek to materialise pure data. The audiovisual installations are composed of a combination of mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. Elaborately composed microscopic visualisations are shown on nine displays on plinths, all tightly synchronised with a minimal soundtrack and features sets of data from recent meta-scientific investigations mapping the human body and the astronomical universe (structures of errors, DNA sequence | chromosome nº11, morse code studies, molecular structure | protein, 4-dimensional hypercube | nodes). Positioned horizontally in intimate relation to the viewer’s body, the installation offers an intimate perception of each singular data investigation.
Echoing data.scan installation, is an ambiguous archeology of encoded knowledge from the systematics series. Systematic patterns of data expression, from archival computer formats to contemporary technology referring to the technological progress of the digital age are displayed. These “primitive” systems, cultural artifacts and remnants of earlier technologies belong to a technological continuum beginning with the earliest stirrings of coded communication. The memory of a song forgotten in the piano roll, is now only silence, absence.
Ryoji Ikeda π, e, ø
Until 20 May
Almine Rech Gallery, London
Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House,
W1K 3JH London UK
In the last decade London’s East End has seen some remarkable changes. The wave of gentrification has forced the once industrial sprawl and urban wasteland of the area into adopting a different facade. ‘East End Mob’ presents work from iconic artists who have been actively painting in the area before and during this change, their character-driven style synonymous with the walls and landscape of the East End.
The line-up includes A.CE London,Coloquix, Dscreet, Mau Mau, Mighty Mo, Pez, Rowdy, Sickboy,Sweet TooF, Tizer, Vinnie Nylon and Cranio.
‘East End Mob’ is an authentic exhibition and much needed nod to some of the biggest pillars in East London’s Street Art and Graffiti scene.
Specially loving the Mighty Mo miniature brick wall, nod from back in 2010.
East End Mob – Until May 14th
BSMT SPACE
5d Stoke Newington Rd
Dalston, N16 8BH
The Centrifugal Soul is the title work and centrepiece of British contemporary artist Mat Collishaw‘s new exhibition at Blain|Southern in London.
The sculpture, in the form of a zoetrope a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion through rapid rotation and stroboscopic light, animates scenes of bowerbirds and birds of paradise as they perform elaborate mating rituals. The work offers a captivating demonstration of how aesthetic diversity has evolved through sexual selection and also reflects the artist’s ongoing examination of our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, a new body of work continues the examination of visual power play with twelve trompe l’oeil paintings of tethered British garden birds revisited with graffiti textured background, in a nod to seventeenth-century fashion for commissioning portraits of prestige pets.
A monumental visual installation titled ‘Albion’ presents a rotating ghostly image of an oak tree, in reference to the mythical Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham.The image represents a living object that is trapped in perpetuity to present the illusion of life.
Throughout his work, Collishaw has examined the way in which we consume imagery and how our biology has conditioned us to respond. The exhibition reflects the consistent themes addressed in the artist’s practice and the diversity of his chosen mediums. Moreover, it questions how much choice we have in accepting what seems to be a natural preoccupation with self-image.
Mat Collishaw
The Centrifugal Soul
Blain|Southern London
Until 7 May 2017
We stopped by the London studio of contemporary artist Hisham Echafaki as he prepares a new body of work with drawings, surrealist paintings,3D paintings and prints to be showcased at the Talented Art Fair opening this Friday.
His surrealist compositions show a real fascination for nature and the animal world through intricate symmetry and patterns with a trompe l’oeil effect.
Most intriguing are the 3D paintings. Using several layers of resin, Hisham Echafaki paints three-dimensional insects, that give the optical illusion they are taxidermy specimen embedded in resin. Each piece is a tribute to the beautiful intricacy and complexity of the insect world but also a critique of how humans are affecting and shaping evolutionary changes in animal species.
In parallel a series of prints from his famous Ballets will be released at the Fair and online here
Hisham Echafaki
Talented Art Fair
17-19 March 2017
Truman Brewery
London E1 6QR
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