Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Hurtfully real

    Hurtfully real

    Paula Rego’s lumpen figures, often so sturdy their proportions seem dwarf-like, have such presence, such immediacy, that it’s easy to forget they are mediated. So much more real than figures in a photograph, which are rarely more than optical phantoms, they are imbued with mass and duration, in a sense that could only be denied… Read more

  • Beautiful, beautiful violence

    Beautiful, beautiful violence

    Many comics today feature anthropomorphic animals, or animal-headed humans, as do animated cartoons, prose fiction and other media. Anyone writing a history of this practice would probably start with Egyptian deities, or with the lion-headed palaeolithic Löwenmensch figurine, but as I know very little about the topic I have no clue how they would extend… Read more

  • Now’s the time

    Now’s the time

    Time is an important theme for now. Wait, what did I just write? For the concept of ‘now’ it seems tautological to stress time’s importance, but it is also an important theme in Now, the sixth and last in a series of exhibitions of that name held at the Modern One gallery of the National… Read more

  • Enough of a twist

    Enough of a twist

    High Georgian ceilings, above vast, perfectly proportioned sash windows, speak to me of cosy home comfort. Wherever I am, if I can look up and past my surroundings to that kind of a backdrop, I’m back in toddler-hood, lazing in that delicious torpor of the up-too-late surrounded by noisy, kindly, drunken adults. This is not… Read more

  • Having the wrong fun

    Having the wrong fun

    Although I spend much of my working life judging books by their covers, The Manchurian Candidate offers an object lesson in not judging movies by their posters. It presents itself as a kind of gritty, serious, political thriller, and is a remake of a pretty well-known 1960s film, which I haven’t seen. The names associated… Read more

  • Saccharine artillery

    Saccharine artillery

    My awareness of Squarepusher began at uni, where I studied the bass guitar. Unsurprisingly, an out-there electronic producer, who also happens to integrate a prodigious facility on bass guitar into his work, went down well among students on my course. This was relatively early in Tom Jenkinson’s career, and he came across basically as a… Read more