Almost anywhere you go in our 2,000-year-old capital, you’re surrounded by history. Soho’s Golden Square, for instance – where Frith Street Gallery’s main venue is located – is a former seventeenth-century plague pit, with over 4,000 victims reputedly buried there. And this forms the basis for Massimo Bartoloni’s show.
Unfortunately, several works come off as arbitrary or heavy-handed – especially those that evoke the number of plague victims. ‘Airplane (Over 4,000)’ is a marble column incorporating an unfolded paper airplane design: a motif the Italian artist intends to function as a kind of memorial. But while Bartolini invokes history as a sort of atmospheric backdrop, he doesn’t tell us any specifics. Former plague pits are a dime a dozen in central London: what makes this one so special?
Other works are more ironic, and more effective. ‘Golden Square’ consists of an odd, eerie piece of music that features all the instruments mentioned in Charles Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And the biggest, central work is great: a huge marble sculpture, chiseled to resemble a natural rock formation, resting above a plinth-like block of the same material. It’s a clever meditation on ideas of nature and artifice – so the fact that it’s based around George II’s statue in the square outside doesn’t really add much extra.