Art

A living city both decays and grows at once. Buildings which are old and falling down exist in the shadow of brand new developments, and the recent lies derelict while the ancient remains active. Entropy sets in before the last brick is in place, by which time the forces of creation are at work elsewhere, destroying the old and laying foundations for the new. Venice, ossified and dissolving into its lagoon, is an exception to this rule; London, bristling with cranes and pocked with building sites, provides proof of it wherever one turns.

These two cities, one expanding, the other sinking,  are the twin subjects of John Virtue’s recent series of dramatic monotypes. The prints are themselves the result of a process that combines creation with destruction – monotype involves printing from a directly inked plate; the initial image is laid on the paper, and cannot be replicated. This tension between becoming and undoing extends into the images: Virtue conjures immediately recognisable views from means which are simultaneously incredibly economical and alarmingly excessive.

London emerges with complete solidity from the most elementary series of smudges and dashes, the skyline’s buildings no less real for being mere abstract marks. This vitality and briefness is then supplemented by a violent mass of smears, sprays and drips, which threatens to overwhelm the images entirely. The view across the Grand Canal is reduced to a wiped ghost of ink, and while Venice appears in these works as ethereal and delicate, Virtue’s London is heavy, veiled in fumes and stricken with a grimy patina of corrosive soot. The air is bad, and it seems neither night nor day. Haloed by white spray, St Paul’s appears as if in a wartime photo, silhouetted against the gloom of an atmosphere like that of a Turner painted in a darkened world.