Allison Katz and Julien Creuzet

Camden Art Centre starts 2022 with two parallel exhibitions by unrelated artists doing unrelated work. One is realistic painting, the other vaguely sculptural plus digital video. But neither is as simple as that. 

Allison Katz, To be Continued Unnoticed, 2019, courtesy the artist. Photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

Winter months seem made for visiting galleries. With covid restrictions, going to any large museum has become massive planning effort, with ever-further-advanced booking and sold-out time slots. But smaller, out of the way galleries offer welcome respite. At Camden Art Centre, you could even just turn up, but booking is recommended. 

There is something meditative and calming about walking in here, something that has long been lost in larger museums – with their bag searches and toilet queues, not to mention queues to see the art. Not at Camden Arts Centre. Here high ceilings, white walls and peace are free of queue and free of charge (unless you are making a donation). 

On top of all that they put on puzzling shows and aren’t shy to do so. If you are looking for a blockbuster, you need to look elsewhere (or on this blog a little later in the year). I must be honest: at first, I found Katz’s show irritating. Why, I asked myself, is this supposed to be good art? Or good curating? The wall text explains that the trompe-l’oeil painting of an elevator is hanging on the opposite side of a real one and that a cockerel in the painting is crossing a road, but also crossing between two walls… as it is hanged between two walls. Sounded a little childish to me. 

Allison Katz, Elevator III (Camden Art Centre), 2021, courtesy the artist and Luring Augustine, New York. Photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

Then there was more – more cockerels, paintings of paintings within open mouths and portraits of/with cabbages. All done in highly realistic manner, sometimes with real rice added for further effect. There seemed to be no connection between these works, except that they are paintings. But the show’s title is Arterysuggesting either that there are images of arteries, or that there are invisible, imaginary arteries between the works. We are asked to believe that the latter is the case. 

In fact, here everything is connected, and nothing is. Everything is linked in a way that anything in the world is linked in one way or another. What is explored in this way is our desire for images to have meaning, for meaning itself. What does it mean if a cabbage is taking central stage, while a profile of a boyfriend is in the background, side-lined? Does it say something about the cabbages, or about the boyfriend, or about the artist herself? I can tell you that all cabbages are different, the paintings are really making each cabbage stand out. The boyfriend seems to be the same on all of them. 

Allison Katz, Cabbage (and Phillip), No.5, 2013, collection of Alexander V. Petalas. Photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

There are also captivating paintings of enormous open mouths with scenes and portraits within them. Do they refer to the textual nature of art – how it all revolves around titles and artists’ names? Or is it about the gut – and how it all originated from inside? The brochure text suggests that mouths may reference language or gut. For me open mouths can have further connotations of vomit or oral sex or music and singing. I guess it depends on your mood. 

The exhibition also includes posters of the exhibition. There are more posters relating to Katz’s other exhibitions on view at Canada House. At Camden Art Centre we only see posters for the current show. Katz brings questioning of what art is onto a very playful level. Nothing is what it seems, and everything is what you want it to be. Posters of the show are inside the show. The artist gives a suggestion, the viewer is the true meaning creator. 

Allison Katz Artery exhibition view, photographed by the author at Camden Art Centre

The accompanying free brochure is very serious and dense. One paragraph begins with ‘Attending to the idiosyncratic and eccentric, to personal mythologies and embodied experience, Katz treats her own biography as source material…’. A paid brochure with text by Mark Godfrey is much more illuminating and worth the £1 it costs. Both texts unpackage what you might only suspect looking at the images – that the images themselves are only references – either to anecdotes from the artist’s life, to other works of art, or to the artist’s questioning of image-making. 

The show is both frustrating and brilliant. You go in ready to look at paintings, come out with questions like: when is a painting not a painting? Or I did anyway. What you see is what you get, and it means either absolutely nothing or it can also be everything. You can admire the hyper-relist technique, you can guess what the combination of images may suggest, you can marvel at the variety and yet uniformity of the cabbage world. In the end – why do we go to art exhibitions? Is it the art itself, the objects, the artist’s name, the overall experience that drags us in? Is it our ability to think and imagine as much as to look and appreciate?

Allison Katz, The Other Side, 2021, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

Julien Creuzet’s exhibition is an altogether different matter. You know it is going to be a very solemn study – one is offered a bibliography at the entrance. And the title of the show is ‘Too blue, too deep, too dark we sank, meandering every moving limb. In the den, in the womb. Too bèlè, too gwo-ka, too biguine, too compass, too kadans, too calypso, too mazurka, too makossa, in my joyful sadness (…)’.  

It’s two primary themes are colonialism and rubbish. The artist combines discarded materials for his sculptural objects and digital technologies for his videos. There are also floor sculptures – stretching on the ground like metal shadows – requiring one to step over them and walk on art. 

Julien Creuzet, Too blue, too deep, too dark we sank, meandering every moving limb. In the den, in the womb. Too bèlè, too gwo-ka, too biguine, too compass, too kadans, too calypso, too mazurka, too makossa, in my joyful sadness (…), exhibition view, photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

Repurposed, possibly washed-ashore remnants of our plastic society are welded together into light, airy and colourful shapes that hang off the ceiling or are perched on the floor. They contrast playfully with the white walls of the gallery. Metal silhouettes cover part of the floor. In the videos human-shaped creatures made of mobile phones or cigarette butts are moving endlessly. All these seem random and turn out to be quite precise. The sculptural forms are taking the shapes of insignia on the flags of Caribbean countries, the silhouettes on the floor refer to Caribbean culture, history and geography, the humanoid in the video is doing a traditional bèlè dance. All individually and collectively refer to the intertwined nature of culture. They bring together Caribbean and European history but also the influence of Caribbean diaspora abroad. 

The sea is an overarching reference. It is via the sea that the cultures met, but also the sea that divides them. It is by the sea that goods are transported around the globe, putting globalisation and consumption hand in hand. It is also the sea that bears the heavy brunt of pollution, and which carries detritus from one part of the world to another. The sea is never stable, just as Creuzet’s works’ meanings. His titles are long, his references intricate. In his work he highlights that colonialism did not only impact societies and cultures, but also nature and the environment. 

Julien Creuzet, Too blue, too deep, too dark we sank, meandering every moving limb. In the den, in the womb. Too bèlè, too gwo-ka, too biguine, too compass, too kadans, too calypso, too mazurka, too makossa, in my joyful sadness (…), exhibition view, photographed at Camden Art Centre by the author

To some extent both exhibitions can be seen as total works of art rather than a collection of art works. More so for Katz and her exploration of what art can mean nowadays, but Creuzet’s assemblages and videos also feed off each other so that both become more compelling. Both shows are first institutional shows – in the UK for Creuzet and the first solo one in London for Katz. This is probably where any relationship between the two shows ends. Except having ‘z’ in both artists’ last names. Surely no one would think any of these were serious associations, or would they? Both these shows make us challenge what we perceive as valid links and consequential meanings.