Julian Opie, Pitzhanger Manor, review: so alienating I wanted to run outside and scream
A nice cool glass of Provençal rose. A leisurely game of pétanque beneath plane trees in a market square. With summer plans still in flux, doesn’t a holiday in the south of France sound desirable?
Julian Opie’s new show at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, once the country house of the eccentric Regency architect John Soane, is full of tantalising suggestions of sunny breaks away in Europe. For instance, three slender, cast-iron sculptures, like railings before a London townhouse, evoke Baroque Portuguese bell towers. A separate body of new work, including an entire room containing a model village, is inspired by a fortified medieval French town near Toulouse where the British artist and his family spend their summers.
Glorious, right? Well, all I can say is that I hope visiting Vic-Fezensac in real life isn’t as alienating as this.
Now 62, Opie, who swiftly established himself as a star after graduating from Goldsmiths in the early Eighties, is renowned for approximating the graphic approach of traffic and safety signage to distil reality’s infinite complexities into spare, elegant marks and codes: if the little green man at a pelican crossing could walk into a gallery, he would recognise the artist’s figures as his long-lost brethren. For years, Opie has been fascinated by models and children’s building blocks, as well as video games and virtual reality, and, here, his preferred French holiday destination gets his signature treatment.
Having systematised Vic-Fezensac’s buildings in a series of self-consciously childlike drawings, he used a computer to turn them into an artificial, maze-like mock-up of the place. As well as that room-sized installation, through which visitors can wander, as though walking into one of Opie’s pictures, there are a couple of “paintings” (really, light-boxes illuminating blown-up stills from his computer model) presenting vistas from the town, and an animation in which a camera drifts, seemingly forever, through its blank, blocky streets, in a manner reminiscent of the classic action-adventure game Tomb Raider, another touchstone for the artist. (For nostalgic gamers, the half-timbered dwellings will also call to mind The Legend of Zelda.)
You know those uncanny, nocturnal views of deserted piazzas by the proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico? That’s the vibe which Opie channels here – except his toy-town, flooded with unforgiving, high-noon sunlight, exists beneath a blemish-free blue sky, as synthetic as a sheet of plastic. Where’s everybody gone? There isn’t a soul in sight. Things feel suspended, unreal, claustrophobic. Even the windows with open shutters reveal black voids.
After a while, I wanted to run into Walpole Park and scream. Except, there, Opie has positioned five double-sided LED screens featuring monochromatic animated crows, endlessly pecking, defecating, and turning their heads, according to an algorithm’s random whims. Is this the natural world – or a petrol station’s forecourt? A group of crows is called a “murder”. There’s no escape.
Opie resists reading his art, which initially seems so innocent and accessible, as an expression of the alienation of modern life. Yet, a sensation of estrangement is precisely what it engenders. At Pitzhanger, he turns the principal gallery into a sort of public square. Here, we find those bell towers, as well as people, and animals, passing by – more “drawings in space”, this time aluminium cut-outs sprayed with automotive paint, mostly seen in profile. (Like Soane before him, Opie collects ancient Egyptian art.)
Everyone is lost in thought. A blue, strolling lady only has eyes for her smartphone. A Muslim woman strides by, likewise oblivious to our presence. Even the yellow dog, its snout seemingly twitching, is engrossed, following a scent. Only a red deer, who looks like she’s gambolled off a hazard sign alerting motorists to beware of wild animals, returns our gaze.
After a year during which emotional connection has been at a premium, I found Opie’s hermetic vision chilling. Which isn’t to say it’s bad: the seeming simplicity of his visual language belies tremendous subtlety. My real gripe concerned the decision to show him at Pitzhanger at all, since little about this self-contained work resonates with the ambience of Soane’s old residence. Sometimes, as with a large, exterior LED sculpture, atop a concrete plinth like a motorway lane divider, of a man in a raincoat walking beneath the four stone caryatids of the building’s façade, it positively clashes.
From June 25 until Oct 24; information: pitzhanger.org.uk
