Days of Plenty / Simple Pleasures: while I’m wandering to and from work, or from pub to pub, or from gallery to gallery, David Batchelor (showing at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery) must roam the streets of London looking for unburied treasure. He finds it, too, in the shape of materials to light up: grimy flat-bed trollies shining mysterious colours and promise from underneath; a box of wires lit up with the pulse of Xmas lights, shampoo bottles joined and lit from inside, former trash ridiculously bright and blank.
And then, marvellously, nothing. The Found Monochromes Of London 1-80: eighty photographic slides, each of white rectangles found on London’s streets. Often faded notices (something someone thought was worth saying, once) each rectangle seems to have a character and a emptiness of its own, but you’re also drawn to the London around them. Some parts are immediately recognizable, some look like generic anywhere-in-town places, others still are familiar but you just can’t put your finger on where they might be. And I’m wondering: what would someone want to say here? What would I want to say here?
And guess what I’ve been noticing all over the place for the past two days?