I-phones and headphones, with bright light bulbs and Adidas trainers, green greasy fries and PlayStation controllers, these are a few of Craig Martin’s favorite things.
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Welcome slabs of vivid color restrained within the fine precision of black tape in Transience at the Serpentine Gallery. Michael Craig Martin is a master in his craft, carrying a lexicon of ‘style-less style’ uses minimal means to recreate technology drawn from 1981 to 2015. A memento-mori to the obsolete technology and a highlight to our mechanically driven world that has shaped our culture, this exhibition is a showstopper. Mainly due to the wallpapered tape-art the artist has directly drawn on the gallery’s wall reminiscent of kitsch 90’s fast food restaurant. Whilst the turquoise walls devouring the central room of the gallery with a high dome ceiling could be anything but unnoticed, but do fall cold and mundane against the bright lit paintings which they hold. Despite the riotous hues animating multiple compositions, the paintings carry elegance in their muted precision- one that would make an architect envious of Craig-Martin’s patience. With work such as a set of portable tellies that have been left unseen since their 1989 showing in Whitechapel the exhibition has pulled out all the tricks in the book.
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We shift from room to room metaphorically-from analogue to digital, sinking in a pool of emotional shock. The empty screens of the laptops and iPhones radiate a saintly light, as we see the bare shapes of the once glorified floppy discs, portable tellies and audiocassettes- now outdated and their usage forgettable. Despite their ephemeral nature and our discarding of them they bounce back to the 21st century through the use of color, making us almost forget how irrelevant they are. As if walking through a land of the ‘technologies-fallen’ army of mechanical waste the artist stated that he is just a witness rather than a judge of the modern world-his sickly green radioactive fries imply otherwise…Light bulb, fast food is unhealthy. And his satire, in a piece that looks like a funny Rothko impersonation, of the back of a credit card, is a commentary for the oligarchs using modern art as trophies.
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The isolated impersonal objects hovering in each painting detach the viewer from an emotional connection. The vivid cold colors, coupled with their one dimensionality provide a mechanical distance between the viewer and the painting. How can you get attached to an object broken down to become intangible luminous colors? And how are these inanimate objects so dear to us today where we can’t live without the blank spaced rectangle resembling an iPhone? It is quite embarrassing for us to see how attached we’ve become to something that is prancing in front of our face as lifeless as Craig-Martin has illustrated. All this while I try to take pictures with my iPhone of an iPhone…
﷯Perhaps the most captivating piece was Martin’s Eye of the Storm (2003), which stood out in a cornucopia of objects. Lacking shadows, or color complexity the piece seems like it has been dragged out of a computer screen. In controlled chaos the piece offers us a view in the vortex of a warped reality, there is cohesion amongst the chaos.
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The paintings render into abstraction and unfamiliarity, isolating each color clearly bordered by the tape, but never quite forgetting what is being represented. In a placid, mute environment they are indifferent contradicting their colorful nature. One thing is for sure, you’ll be leaning in trying to catch off guard a piece of tape that was misplaced but to your disappointment-or for architects satisfaction for fine lines- there is none.
If you think these drawings fall too flat the incompetence might be lying from your side of the line. Sometimes you just have to stick to the surface, because there might be something erupting if you dwell in too deep.

25 Nov-14 Feb
Michael Craig Martin: Transience on view at Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens
For more information check out: www.serpentinegalleries.org

Slip off your shoes, submerge into a ball pit and watch a film of … well I am not entirely sure. Sometimes, art is just plain weird, but at Jon Rafman’s solo show at Zabludowicz Collection, I caught a glimpse of the future and had a blast doing so.

Entering the mad, mad world as simulated by Rafman is beyond any coherent, determined description I could ever manifest, but I will muster my eloquence to unpick the unfolding absurdity.

The atmosphere is dark like the blue-black of the deepest sea, then drawing you in are beacons of artificial light. Illuminated immersive sets are sporadically stationed around the space – the first encounter being the ball pit, Still Life (Betamale). Under the mass of pearly iridescent balls, you gaze up towards a screen playing a film of endless digital imagery spliced together in a twisting, cryptic narrative. Buried in the pit, you feel the life-consuming weight of the Internet, like the late nights lost to the dark-side of the web.
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Regain your composure and nestle into Mainsqueeze (Hug Sofa) where the sofa literally hugs you, but similar to Still Life the effect is perilously close to smothering. Although, we need comforting as we watch an anime couple making out and a bodybuilder crush a watermelon betwixt his thighs. Soothed on the outside whilst your mind is a mess – the sensation is extremely unsettling.
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Relentless, seductive, repulsive: the video works by Rafman are composite and engrossing as you descend deeper into unreality. However, often the sculptural sets overwhelm the moving image. Sticky Drama is the foremost example – inside the kitschy teenage room defiled by splashes of florescent green slime, I was too distracted by the detritus of a pre-teen girl to spare my attention to the film. The screen feels so separate to the space that this disjuncture ultimately spoils the immersion.
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The pièce de résistance requires a bit of a hunt and wait. Wandering along the tangled paths of a hedge maze, you pass Rafman’s glitchy busts in pursuit of the treasure in the centre – an Oculus Rift. Experiencing this virtual reality system, as you are transported up and over the maze everything feels familiar and yet foreign, and genuinely I gasped at the sheer believability of the appliance.

If you can endure all that – congrats and don’t worry – because a well-deserved rest comes in the form of a massage chair and waterbed to watch the next assortment of films. It all may seem ridiculous but Rafman’s work is not stupid, as the boundaries between virtual and reality become blurred, the life we lead online and our existence offline are no longer distinguishable.

I left Zabludowicz feeling a little braindead, disorientated and blinking in the sunlight of real life. I had just been on a journey, in and out of a digital world. Then, it dawned on me; we are already trapped in this world of our own making.