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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