Any other business

To set the ball rolling, here's quite a long quotation from the English-language version of the leaflet handed out at the entrance to Immortelle , a big new exhibition at MO.CO. in Montpellier,  subtitled 'Vitality of young French figurative painting': I might as well get it down on paper straight off, so as to avoid any misunderstandings: Immortelle (Immortal) is a combat exhibition.  The point is to affirm a simple truth in all its ramifications: painting is immortal. So it’s just as pointless to rejoice about its return, or to regret it, as it would be to ramble on about the death of literature or music. This assertion is accompanied by solidly grounded convictions. No, the ‘Retinal painting’ reviled by Marcel Duchamp has never stopped producing masterpieces. No, figurative painting is not reactionary and backward-looking. No, France is not a country outside of history – the history that Germany, the United States and the emerging countries have never left behind – wher...

The original reason for this trip to Madrid at the end of February was to catch Händel's Solomon under Harry Bicket , with Ann Hallenberg singing the title role for the first time, written up on my other blog (behind the link). But it turned out that Solomon coincided with ARCO, Madrid's contemporary art fair, so after Frieze and Felix in Los Angeles , I found myself tramping round the booths again in Spain. And what a lot of booths there were, filling two huge halls. It was interesting to see so many galleries not only from Spain and Portugal, but also from Latin America, and get a feel for what's going on across the Atlantic and the Equator. But on the whole, I wasn't actually grabbed by anything in particular - I mean, there was nothing I frankly lusted after - except, predictably, Rayan Yasmineh's latest painting, on show at Mor Charpentier. The following are a few shots from the fair; the text continues after them. I don't know how many times I've been...

I made this trip to Los Angeles for the fairs, but the best thing about it was catching the tail end of Tala Madani's big show, Biscuits , at Geffen Contemporary, presented by Tala herself. Both she and her work are fearless and funny, reminding me, incongruously no doubt, of Ivy Compton-Burnett. I mean, she deals with some of the worst, most shocking aspects of human behaviour, taking risks and breaking taboos, but nevertheless does it with humour. She's intelligent, articulate and passionate, about her work and about her country. Discussion of the current situation in Iran and how to help, over a casual lunch of German  wurst hot-dogs with half a dozen Iranian friends before she returned to the Geffen to sign catalogues, was intense. And it was a great show, including a room of magnificent, giant 'sky' paintings made specially for the space, though I didn't do a great job of photographing it... Art in America wrote about the show much better than I can. And ther...

Shortly before I left for Los Angeles, the Richard Heller Gallery there sent me my latest purchase, an extraordinary little oil painting on board, called Have Fun! , by Sean Norvet (pictured above). For my stay in LA, I booked a spartan, overpriced hotel on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, to the north of the airport and within walking distance of Frieze. As it happened, my lunch guest on the second day, an LA resident, chose a restaurant (Lunetta) just ten minutes' walk along the boulevard. Over breakfast in the hotel, I opened Google Maps to see if there was anything I could visit locally to while away the time until lunch, and spotted a place called ' Bergamot Station Arts Center '. I looked it up to get details, and it turned out to be a cluster of galleries, including, believe it or not, Richard Heller, just north of the restaurant. So after breakfast, off I went, clutching my camera. The gallery was just setting up two new exhibitions, one in each of its rooms, openin...