By Steven Smith
One of my favourite portraits is by the divine Italian artist Ernesto Romano. So when I heard he was sharing an exhibition with the Mexican-Spanish artist Juan Bablo Chipe, whom he met during an artist residency in Shanghai, I couldn’t wait to sashay down to Firepit Art Gallery in Greenwich. I expected the portraits to draw me in. I hadn’t counted on being drawn in by a packet of spicy noodles.
In Between Perception & Construction, Chipe gives that packet top billing in a collage with the cheek of a fashion editorial hijacked by the corner shop. A figure in head-to-toe patterned Valentino sits among snack wrappers, a Vans logo and the Abercrombie & Fitch moose. The noodles land where you expect a face, and once you’ve seen them, it’s hard to look anywhere else.
I like how little reverence Chipe has for the pecking order of brands. The White Rabbit sweet wrapper holds its own against the designer print. There’s a joke in seeing them given equal billing, and it’s partly at our expense. I recognised the logos almost at once. It took me a little longer to notice the elegant bend of the figure’s knee and the way the pattern on the clothes carries your eye down the page.
Romano’s infrared photography makes a familiar scene strange in a different way. In one untitled work, a figure bends over what looks like a mixing desk, their face almost lost in electric blue while the controls glow yellow. Against Firepit’s warm timber panelling, the photograph has the charge of a late-night club scene. The longer I looked, the more intimate it felt. There’s a second figure just behind, but my eye kept coming back to the hands hovering over the controls. You can almost imagine the sound changing with the next movement.
Romano has a dry wit, too. In his First Lady – Neon Edition, the familiar grammar of a postage stamp gives us a crown, a profile and a first-class mark. Then you clock the skull. The orange frame is gloriously showy, which makes the rather macabre joke all the better.
What I enjoyed most about the pairing was the way each artist made me look again for a different reason. Chipe made me laugh at how quickly I recognised a brand, then made me wonder why I’d looked at the packet before the person. Romano held my attention with something as small as the angle of a wrist. I went to Firepit because I love one of his portraits. The image I kept thinking about afterwards was the one in which I could barely make out a face.
https://firepit.art on for the next three weeks.
