September 8 - October 5 Tuesday to Friday 1:30 - 7:30 pm

Surface in Notting Hill from the tube, subway, I see the girls and boys with flush cheeks the cafes the antique shops and sniff the swanking smell of wealth. Welcome to hell!

At the green door to Sartorial Contemporary Art, I contemptuously press the buzzer and am answered by a Brazilian receptionist. Yees? She says. Art? I ask, no longer sure. Come een.

The hallway contains no Ming or Qing vases. Some deranged apparition of A R Penck has scrawled in 20 feet high green stick figure letters Subway Ghosts. With sweet colour compliment the same fist has pinked a series of sexed up tridents ascending the stairs. At least this James Jessop has wrecked the walls with his havoc I say to myself (who else to talk to?).


'Subway Ghosts' 2006. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 250 x 342 cm

In the gallery, O glorious 18th Century windows letting in 21st Century radiation, the artiste has kept the paint on the canvas.

A big monster painting dominates one whole wall, a Hell's Express subway train, impastoly painted, thickly I mean. It bridges a street of lovely little Lowry figures milling about the post-industrial Bronx. They are painted like this guy sees people as graffiti, which makes the whole as weird as looking up at a Tiepolo in some tourist trap church in Venice.

In the other gallery an eyeball paints fame on a train whilst a business man in a seventies suit buries his head in yesterday's paper. All the world, words, people, buildings, trains, sky is flattened into one universe by this one eyed sight, which scans pattern, colour and shape, ignoring what they mean in three dimensions, scorning perspective as idealism, giving us doorways that cannot be penetrated.

All the world's a painting, you see, I say.

Subway Ghosts by James Jessop

101A Kensington Church Street
London W8 7LN (tube Notting Hill)
September 8 - October 5
Tuesday to Friday 1:30 - 7:30 pm
www.sartorialart.com / info@sartorialart.com
Tel: 020 7793 5882 / Fax: 020 7792 5820

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