ARTS OMEGA is presenting images of London by the British artist Paul Sakoilsky. The exuberant works particularly his recent paintings ‘Good Night’, ‘Night Study Storm’, ‘Sky/Plane Study’, ‘Blue Moon’ will be a future testament of the tremendous changes that are currently afflicting our city. Cranes can be observed, high above the lofty towers in carnivorous anticipation to decimate what lies beneath. London as we see it now, will never be the same.”We are blind to our losses, post apocalyptic development, and the inevitable evolution of London may be a bland and empty sanitised unrecognisable Megalopolis”. One Man’s vision of London, will have been changed forever – as we succumb to “Borisland”.
The Dark Times is a multi-mediated ‘art’ project, an aesthetico-theoretical, political, (with a small ‘p’) conceit, and most of all, a way of being, seeing, making, doing. At it’s centre stands an ongoing series of hundreds of over-painted and collaged tabloid newspapers from 2006 onwards. Since then, there have been various installations, performances, objects, paintings and dialogues in UK and Europe, as well as a curatorial extension which included the first ‘dark times: newspaper’ in F-ish Gallery, Sussex, England. The humour evoked by his daily rhetoric in The Dark Times (undoubtedly born in Grub Street), and his perspective, as Editor in Chief on daily life GB Inc., lampooning political satire, and observance of humanity with dark insight into man’s desires and deepest fears, and the wickedness, greed and depravity of our times, reminds me of predecessors, Scarf and the great visual Documentarian Hogarth & irreverent publications such as Punch. And yet there is more depths and persona’s and veneers co existing with Sakoilsky as both a painter, documentarian, performer, poet.
The gentleness of the delicate and beautiful oil paintings, ‘Spring Delay’, ‘Tower/Bow Church’, ‘Window’, ‘Finsbury Park’, are in exact juxtaposition with the almost brutal sometimes shocking drama and passion of oil paintings of Towers and Corporate monolithic London.
Paul Sakoilsky a man beyond reason and beyond definition … ‘London’ @ Arts Omega until 10 March