Concrete sport pitches are dotted throughout this city like thousands of tarmac scabs that just won’t heal. They’re places for congregating, for fighting, for socialising, for competing: they’re where countless Londoners do their growing up. And Eddie Peake is one of them. He spent his youth near Finsbury Park, doing what kids do on concrete recreation grounds. In this show, he’s reimagined the gallery as a new pitch, a concrete playground for grown-ups.
The fog of nostalgia hangs heavy in the air: it’s not just his childhood pitch he’s part-recreating, Peake has also brought his teen heroes from pirate radio station Kool FM (now Kool London) to broadcast from the gallery, pumping jungle and garage out into the space. Curving through the gallery is a long line of metal trays covered in great gloopy globs of hair gel, neon signs and speakers. It’s a sculptural take on Stroud Green Road – corner shops, barbers, people, all throbbing and heaving together. The speakers scream out a constantly rising tone, like thousands of buses going past at once. It’s tense, loud, hectic.
There’s a film showing naked dancers in a screened-off section in the middle of the gallery. A click-click-click ticks them along as a projection behind shows Peake in the nude next to images from art history. There are paintings lining the walls, too: big neon semi-abstracts, like ’90s album covers for records Miles Davis never got to make. Peake will be working and performing in the gallery throughout the show as well – dancing, painting on the concrete walls, writing poetry.
But is it all a bit of a mess? Yes. There’s so much going on and, as good as the film and Stroud Green Road piece are, the cynical side of you might want to dismiss the whole drum ’n’ bass in a fancy gallery thing as pompous, over-the-top, Nathan Barley-esque hipster douche-ism par excellence. And as nice as the paintings are, they feel like odd, conservative add-ons to the radical rethinking of the space.
But here’s the thing: you can’t be cynical, because he’s not cynical. Eddie really means this. This is his whole life on display. It’s his youth, his worries, his vanities, his loves, his ideas, his art. You can have a problem with the paintings, or the music, or the ideas, but Peake is so open and honest that you can’t help but get swallowed by it. By creating a concrete pitch for his adult self, Peake has made a safe space to do whatever he wants in. It’s erotic but banal, pretentious but approachable, pretty but ugly: it’s life in London and it’s a mess, but maybe that’s why we love it.
@eddyfrankel
