Nothing is Forever

'Nothing is Forever' - it's more of a statement than a title, and a curious one for a group exhibition of wall drawings and paintings that inaugurates a very permanent architectural extension to the South London Gallery. One does not immediately associate this rain-on-your-parade, realist sensibility with unveilings. It does, however, perfectly corral the temporary interventions of a predominantly British bunch of artists and underline the fact that however loved and well-respected the gallery, things had to change for it to become the major art centre it undoubtably now is.

The easy-going cafe-cultural scene that greets one out front is certainly helped by good weather, but 6a Architects have re-worked the derelict property next door to make the site as inclusive and attractive to the wider public as possible. One can 'do it properly' - go in through the old familiar front door and into the main gallery - or by way of the cafe itself, which leads to a multipurpose atrium space made all the more cathedral-like by Paul Morrison's gold-leaf designs that appear to dematerialise at the edges under the effects of the sun.

The big box of impermanent text that constitutes the main space intially appears an extremely bold aesthetic strategy. Yet, once surrounded by the sloganic and diaristic expressions of Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Mark Titchner and Fiona Banner, the instructional tone rings with uncertainty as opposed to evangelism.
From the clean conceptualism of Barry's 'telepathic' messages, to Titchner's eerily pertinent brand of prophecy and Banner's handwritten account of 2001 US war film 'Black Hawk Down', each artist plays with the dogma, pretensions or dangers of political and media messaging to equally philosophical ends.

Leaving the familiar bits of the gallery body for the first time elicits the thrill of trespassing, for there's a domestic intimacy to the materiality and scale of the interconnecting and new exhibition spaces at odds with the classical formality of the original design. The site-specificity of thin black fault lines slicing up the stairwell and Ernst Caramelle's coloured swatches of pigment illuminating the unfinshed upper spaces certainly highlight the progressive nature of the build and the gallery's new remit. The conversational atmosphere generated between 'zine-graphic works by Milly Thompson and Craig Fisher is continued in the Outset Artist's 'flat' bathroom with Sam Dargan's toilet grafitti on the subjective nature of historical accounts -- a perfectly executed narration of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Back downstairs in the Clore Studio education space, Lily van der Stokker's candy-coloured painting appears whimsical cheerleader to a Monty Python-style face-off between Dan Perjovschi and David Shrigley. Perjovschi slices through newspaper culture like an origamist assassin. One enters this marker-pen drawing on the stories of the day (left to right) via the fat middle finger of a label slave, is then flicked around the (now four) budget-affected rings of the Olympic games, across oil spills and into the 'Exit Strategy', a graveyard. Shrigley's political tone is more difficult to gauge. His black elephant bearing the word 'Poverty' is most definitely in the room -- a situation intensified by the close proximity of a council estate. This small gap between sites feels more like a chasm, but the fact that SLG is comfortable with a message of this kind being written into the legacy of the project bodes well for the site's future.