Press

October 2009

Joe Bradley at Jonathan Viner/Silly Things at FOLD

Time In London

It’s Friday night and London Fields has turned out for openings at Jonathan Viner and FOLD galleries, handily situated in the same block opposite the train station.

Downstairs, Viner’s played host to Joe Bradley’s black and white oil bar doodles. The infantilism of Bradley’s drawings irritated and then charmed me: I gradually warmed to a line painting of a top hat with a penis in it, shot through by Cupid’s feathered arrow. After looking twice and then three times, I came to be quite fond of an image of a woman’s torso, reminiscent of two massive cocktail olives balancing on a full martini glass. However, I could not bring myself to like a work which represented a female bust as two blank canvases adorned only by a pair of shooting target boobs. ‘Imagine if these were painted by a woman’ I said to my friend. ‘These are not by a woman’.

Upstairs at FOLD, their new group painting show – Silly Things – was packed with chequered shirts. Between the lumberjack backs I discovered a couple of brilliant, strangely retro, painters. Sam Windett’s paintings have more than a hint of modernism about them; dark, moody colours; careful compositions of shapes and subtly textured brushwork. Dominic Kennedy seemed to me to be channelling the Impressionists with a focus on colour, rendered in short, shallow brushstrokes. My favourite piece of the night was a small abstract by Kennedy, where small areas of red and grey paint fought for attention with large areas of patchy white, yellow and pastel green. It put me in mind of the patterns of dappled sunlight on the paths of French parks in some of the more beautiful Vuillard paintings. Hugely satisfying to look at and definitely beat the boobs downstairs.

February 2008

The Art Newspaper

In the trade

Fresh from taking down Charles Saatchi's USA Today exhibition at the Hermitage in St Peteresburg, London Designer Kim Savage is opening Fold Gallery London on February 1. The space, on Fortescue Avenue in the East End, opens with a group show of emerging artists including Alex Robbins, Justin Brown, Jeroen Offerman and Dan Davis. Mr Savage was head designer at the Saatchi gallery;Fold Gallery is a joint venture with his fiancée Sharrine Scholtz, who still works for Charles Saatchi.