The dark glasses wearing gloomy commentator on food and architecture has an art exhibition, housed in the achingly fashionable part of London in an achingly fashionable unfinished space of an empty building.
A doorway with the distinctive silhouette of the man, in glasses, draws the visitor into a large empty space, with a lady behind the desk confirming the exhibition is open, and a newspaper with commentary about what the artist is complaining about. Mostly complaining. Lots of it.
The rest of the white and grey concrete space is filled with huge canvases, too vast to fill a home, other than a mansion, more for corporate office blocks where marketing people decide how the foyer should espouse the values of the Corporate Social Responsibility fluffy side of whatever it is they do.
Sending staff out for a day planting trees and painting walls — choosing suitable artists to adorn a wall and breath just the right amount of edginess into the corporate mindscape.
A huge painting of maybe a face almost lost in its greyness against the grey wall too easily overlooked, but to each visitor overheard by the correspondent, a moment of surprise and delight.
Some works are seemingly random assemblages of colour, others look almost identifiable, photos of reality distorted by magnification and color distortion.
Is that the head of a pint of beer, or just random bubbles? A landscape, or frenetic scratchings on canvas?
Other works, more human scale, cluster together in batches.
In the far corner, at the very end, the self-portrait. Clearly identifiable, without the small handwritten note beside. Meades at last, the real man, in red and darkness.
The exhibition, Ape forgets Medication is open daily, 12pm-7pm until April 23rd. Entry is free.
Londonewcastle Project,
28 Redchurch Street,
London
E2 7DP
Meades has a new TV series out soon – supposed to be this month, but the TV schedule is running out of days that could happen on.
