Any other business

Kévin Bray is another young artist, this time French and working in Amsterdam, I first got to know about through Mamali Shafahi. For some reason I haven't yet worked out, I'm especially drawn to artists who work in a range of media and bring them together in installations:  Neïl Beloufa or Jon Rafman , for example. Kévin works in film and video, graphic design, sculpture, sound design and installations... and his production straddles the line between digital and analogue in such a way as to blur the distinction. I first saw his work 'in real life' in the autumn of 2019, in a little exhibition called 'Morpher III', at FOAM in Amsterdam, and at the Rijksakademie's open days, where his studio was one of only a few I personally found of interest; I met him very briefly, around the same time, as we crossed paths at Amsterdam's central station. I saw more in Kévin's installation at the Palais de Tokyo's exhibition Future, Former, Fugitive , 'brin...

Waiting Line, 2020 (detail; the full painting is 16 x 23 cm) Jean Claracq is a young artist whose work I first came across at the Sultana gallery in Paris and at a couple of institutional group exhibitions. Then, when I went to an open day at Le Houloc, a studio in the Paris suburbs shared by nearly 20 young artists (invited by the amazingly dynamic Célia Coëtte ), I had the good fortune to meet him and was able to visit his studio space there. He often works on a small scale, and thus sometimes combines contemporary content with references (direct quotations or not) to medieval manuscripts, portrait miniatures such as Hilliard's, the details (landscapes, perspectives, distant cities, forests, skies...) of renaissance art, and oriental painting of, e.g., Iran's negargari tradition. When I visited Le Houloc, as I take an amateurish interest in Iranian art, I was interested to see he was working on a small painting, at that time just sketched out, to be called Waiting Line  (a...

  I got to know  spetsofai at Stelios, my 'local' taverna in Mikri Viglia on Naxos, in the Cyclades, where they make you a huge bowl of it to order - so huge that, now, I order one portion for two, with a plate of plain white rice on the side. If you look it up, you'll find spetsofai is supposed to be sausages with sweet peppers and, to make it hot, chillis. At Stelios, a family taverna, I doubt anyone has ever looked into the matter or cares much. They make it more or less like a ratatouille , with courgettes and aubergines and not hot at all, and as I first ate it there, I like it with cubes of aubergine. In any case, if you want an authentic recipe, Akis Petretzikis, whose recipes are foolproof, has one . If you don't really mind either way, here's mine. As usual, making it is easy. The problem is to find a good sausage. Greek 'country sausage', as they call it on menus - loukaniko - is more rustic in flavour and texture than anything I could find in P...

Last year, the BBC issued a three-part series called Art of Persia . I discussed it a lot with friends on Facebook at the time, and we agreed it was a huge disappointment. 'Dreadful,' said one friend in the UK who's written and published art books. It's now showing, dubbed into French (and German, I guess) on Arte, a culturally-oriented Franco-German TV channel. I've had time, by now, to get used to the idea of its not being about art, but, having watched it again so I can talk about it with French friends, I've ended up even more bewildered than last year. The title in English was, then,  Art of Persia . I can easily imagine the BBC seeing the point in making that: a panorama of gorgeous Persian art and architecture over the centuries, with sweeping landscapes and snatches of local colour. People would watch. The Corporation probably also knew the Victoria & Albert Museum was planning a big exhibition called Epic Iran: 5,000 Years of Culture , for early 20...

When I first started cooking Asian food, one of the things I used to make was a chicken dish with lemon and coriander from a BBC book by Madhur Jaffrey. Later, for Iranian guests, I sort-of 'persianised' the recipe, and served it with rice made the Persian way, with a golden crust. This is the result. If possible, start the morning before a dinner, or the day before a lunch. For four people with an appetite, you need eight chicken pieces. As I said before, I usually buy what the French call the ' haut de cuisse ', the thigh without the drumstick. If they're from the supermarket, you may need to trim off some 'make-weight' fat and skin tucked underneath the pieces. Set them to brown in hot oil, first one side, then the other. Personally, to avoid getting oil and chicken fat all over the kitchen, I do this with a lid on and, having done one side, switch the heat off for a while to let the spitting die down before turning the pieces over and switching back on a...

Artist Mamali Shafahi drew my attention last year to the Everyday Gallery in Antwerp, and at the same time in particular to the work of one of the gallery's artists, Jacopo Pagin. Owing to COVID-19 restrictions, I haven't yet been able to visit Everyday in person, but I like very much what I've seen online - artists and curating. At the moment, Everyday have two exhibitions running concurrently, joined together through a curtained archway (above). One, ' Crystal Whisper' is a solo show devoted to Jacopo Pagin, with an installation by Richard Venlet; the other, called ‘ History of Fantasy ’, is a group show including one work by Pagin again, and one by Mamali Shafahi, about whose nerd_funk project, with Ali Eslami, I posted here a couple of weeks back . Only this morning, in an email to another artist in England, I wrote: 'What charms me in Jacopo Pagin's work is that it's so distinctly Italian, in a way I haven't yet found words to explain. There a...

Anna Uddenberg is a Swedish artist whose work has, I think, something quite original, distinctive and perceptive to say about the image of women in certain, specific currents of consumer culture that might otherwise be overlooked. I hadn't seen much of her recently, but she now has an exhibition, at her Berlin Gallery, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (or K-T Z), of totally new works focusing, this time, not on women but on men. The resulting woodcarvings are an interesting and quite surprising development, and add to what seems to be almost a 'fashion' for reliefs in art at the moment. This is the link to the new exhibition, 'Big Baby' , at K-T Z. This is the link to a video about the new work, on Vimeo , but the video is also on the gallery website. This is the direct link to the page about Anna Uddenberg on the gallery site. The following are some photos of Anna Uddenberg's new and previous work, 'borrowed' from K-T Z.