The debate on the impact of opening our borders to the Romanian and Bulgarian people is in the news.
I watched the channel 4 news report which followed Nigel Farage to Bulgaria as he discovered not everyone was ready to leave their homeland at the drop of a hat and that Jeremy Paxman has a counterpoint in the local presenter that launched into an immediate assault on Farage citing the imperialist history of Britain and his own french protestant roots leaving him gulping instead of inanely grinning.
I also saw the amazing contemporary realist paintings of Romanian Dan Voinea and the vibrant woodcuts of Romanian twins Gert and Uwe Tobias.
Dan Voinea showing at Beers Lambert constructs paintings that capture something of an absurd moment, the figures he paints are exerted, intense and contorted. They are focused on some event which is not clear but is captivating, like being at the back of the crowd straining to see what everyone is looking at but having to be content with a fleeting glance leaving the rest to the imagination. He works from photographs taken in different eras mashing time together. His figures wear the clothes of the forties or the seventies but seem placed in a current context.
Dan Voinea
The Tobias twins showing at Whitechapel gallery also mess with time. Using folk art imagery, the typewriter and surreal paper collages they evoke past times in the making and composition of their work but there is something uncertain about its origins in the overall aesthetics making it hard to place.
Gert and Uwe Tobias
Playful and vibrant their woodcuts on canvas are giant dramatic explosions of colour like putting an electic shock through an Ernst Haeckel illustration of protozoa.
While at the Whitechapel Gallery I was able to have another look into Giuseppe Penone’s Spazio di Luce
Giuseppe Penone
Openings are just so much better
Susan Eyre 