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