Andy Doig's Crosses featured on the opening night for Geisha Arts

We’ve all seen bar/cafe arts venues, usually an uneasy collaboration of cafe owner and poor calibre artists, with bland art getting a distinct back stage to the lattes, lagers and grilled paninis. At the opening of Geisha Arts (see here for details), I had a sudden realisation: this is the first time I’ve seen it done right. The emphasis is 50/50 art/cafe bar. Not some place with ropey pictures hung on the walls as an afterthought. But award winning artists placing their work at the centre of the hip Brighton Clientele.

Geisha arts is the brain child of Zac and Miranda Walsh in collaboration with the people at Madame Geisha. They have pushed the envelope to deliver a true art venue that marries harmoniously with a modern eating and drinking establishment – they haven’t sacrificed their ideals or strayed too far from their personal knowledge of the arts. It is an uncompromising urban space, a perfect canvas to show the best of underground emerging  and established artists. Its also a good place to go and have a drink or something to eat, somewhere were you can interact, appreciate and discuss the artwork beyond the rarified confines of an alienating gallery system. And lets face it, its nice to have a drink in hand when looking at artwork (there’s a few boring conceptual shows in London I’ve attended that could learn a lesson here).

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There’s an air of anticipation as you come out Regents Park tube station and cross over with the crowd towards the Frieze art fair.

But it’s not hard to find your way from there. As soon as you see the entrance, looming ahead like a plywood Brandenburg Gate, you know that this is the big one before you even step inside. And if there was still any doubt in your mind before you passed under the arch that this wasn’t about big name galleries, artists and collectors, then the line of chauffeur driven cars waiting to your lift will confirm things.

It’s hardly cheap to enter either, at twenty quid a pop, and twenty-five on the weekend. And once you get inside, well, it’s like entering the equivalent of a giant hypermarket, except, instead of the foods and wines of the delicatessen; we are offered the delicacy of art. But it won’t be to every ones taste. There are a 150 galleries represented here from all over the world, from Tokyo, Berlin, Prague and even Rio.
And how do you even digest that much art? I decided to do lane-by-lane and go from there.

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Two years have elapsed since his last full outing, so this latest solo show by Adam Neate has been widely anticipated.

But even if we hadn’t read the pre-exhibition PR, we could tell he was back by the plethora of posters and books that have started popping up on e-bay by the flippers, not wanting to let an opportunity to make a few quid out of the generosity of an artist to sit there and sign his name go to waste.

But with figures from anywhere between nine and fifty thousand pounds it would seem that these prices are out of sync with the present climate, but this is looking like a sell-out show. And if you were lucky enough to pick up one of the thousand works left on the street by Adam you might want to congratulate yourself on your good luck. Or exploit the situation like some, and bung it on e-bay with all the posters and books. And it wasn’t so long ago that Adam was leaving surplus work outside of charity shops only to have them rejected and put outside on the step for the bin men to take away. Oh for the gift of hindsight.

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Micallef is back in his first solo show for three years. The detachment and dislocation, displayed by his Harajuku girls and Giant Freaks, is still there, but this is altogether a much darker chocolate. He has stayed much closer to home this time, and a pretty disturbing picture of home he paints.

Stepping into this show is like stepping back in time into a Victorian lunatic asylum.
Head studies with reddened mouths, have the look of feasting zombies or of cunnilingus performed on menstruating partners. His Bacon-esque self-portraits and faces stare out at you with despair, like desperate in-mates for the terminally insane. They are bold, challenging, arresting, and quite brilliant, but would you want them looking at you in the morning over your bowl of Cheerios?

‘Becoming Animal’ takes that theme literally at times, whether morphing faces into beasts or planting the heads of jackals on to his subjects. Then Antony Micallef takes on the sex traffickers. Perhaps the connection here is the animalistic behaviour of man and the traffickers. He takes the sex phone cards that clog the phone booths of Soho and manipulates the messages to alert us of the horrors behind the surface offering. But does this shock tactic tell us anything we don’t know? Yes, it’s all very terrible, but what does he want us to do about it? He’s preaching to the converted here. The real perverts and gangsters that perpetrate these crimes will, I suspect, be unmoved. And ironically, for all the darkness in this show, and there is much, this subject matter is the most lightweight.

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I wonder if Tyson believes in god, or perhaps some none conceited name for divinity – the universe, the multi-verse, the Tao? An interesting interpretation of Cloud Choreography and other emergent systems, by Keith Tyson (showing at Plimsoll Uni, Wharf Street), is one of authorship…who makes the art, where does creation come from, can confining and enshrining flukes, acts of randomness and results from machine-like protocols and artificial systems really count as the work of an artist?

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The qualities of solitude, silence and stillness are not anathema to the craft of the landscapist, but central to the required vision, they are qualities inherent in the vista. Miriam Jarrs’ exemplary paintings reinforces this perspective in her new show Gleaming h at the Sesame Gallery, Angel. Yet within this stillness there is a movement of sorts, Jarrs’ work remains true to its own inner forces, contains a coherence of elements – there is a subtle gravity, a breeze blows gently off stage binding the entire collection, the skies swarm with a green that is oddly restful.

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Just a short post to implore you to get down to the Menier Gallery on Southwark street, and see Eloise O’Hare’s new exhibition Undiagnosed Madness, whilst its still on.

After suffering the pretensions of some truly awful academically led, art theory inspired conceptual work recently, it was refreshing to see something different; art infused with raw childlike imagination, unfettered by the constrictions of current art philosophy.

O’Hare’s wonder and singular approach infuses everything with enthusiasm and whimsy, the paintings are composed in a naive idiosyncratic style, colours are vivid and expressive, perspective and composition takes a back seat to lyricism and storytelling. There’s a touch of Stella Vine about some of these paintings, especially the super hero inspired ones and perhaps the St Patrick in Ireland series.

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Zach Walsh: Ares, God of War. (photo courtesy Vinny Moran)

Its summer, and its holiday times. Eagle eyed readers will have noticed my hiatus from these pages, for extended boozy jollies round these most British of isles. My latest excursion takes me to Brighton, or London-lite as I kept calling it to annoy the locals.

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The consistently excellent Paradise Row’s new exhibition features Douglas White’s Elephant Totem Song inspired from a poem of the same name by Ted Hughes. Consisting of parts of a single felled Beech tree, White explores the branches and the roots, the up and the down, the large and the small of his material.

Immediately the subject matter evokes earthiness, the occult growth of root systems unearthed into light, separated tenderly from the gravity of their soil. Yet rarely has subject matter and material been put together so lyrically, so harmoniously.

I remember reading Ted Hughes’ commentary of the to my mind superior poet Sylvia Plath. He said, she took a pragmatic approach to her work; if she couldn’t get a wardrobe out of a poem she was happy with a bedside table.  Well whether White started out to get an elephant or began with the idea to produce sculpture from a single beech tree and the elephant suggested itself, demanded itself is another matter – but unmistakably White has captured a quintessential ‘elephantness’ here. Powerfully resonant, the intricate and painstakingly dug up roots act like bonsai branches, stripped bare by some African drought. In reality though they suggest the long forgotten promise of water. A furtive searching for sustenance. There is an unmistakable lineage from tendril, root, trunk and branch to elephant, from flora to fauna to human cultural interactions with all of the above.

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