The Regent Street Salon

Back in the day (from the 17th century onwards), the intelligentsia used to gather in one another’s homes for evenings of literature, art and other mind-expanding pursuits. Particularly popular in France, these meetings were called ‘salons’.

Crystal Bennes, wearer of the most daring dress since Liz Hurley showed secondary uses for safety pins, has staged a revival of these cultural hotbeds and for two weeks, from Monday 31 August, a pop-up exhibition featuring painters, photographers, film-makers, installation artists, comedians, dramatists, writers and poets lurked behind the vacant shop front of 295 Regent Street.

There are two apologies I should make before plunging into this review. 1) by the time this  publishes the exhibit will be well and truly over, kaput, shut-up shop and b)on the launch night that I attended there were no performers, merely art – merely art, as if like a regular threesome goer, one partner can’t do it for me any more.

Proceedings kicked-off with a free vodka  tonic courtesy of Slipsmith. With this icy beverage shooting down my oesophagus, I meandered around the empty space taking in the works by ten different artists.

Best by a long stretch was Alexandra Valy’s People in Glass Houses. Cordoned off behind black flats, this tiny glass house, lit from within, was inspired by the artist walking home and seeing house after house lit by the glow of TV screens. The idea of people plugging themselves into the box every night was crushing but, at the same time, the effect of this little glowing house, shining brightly amidst the black, was calming.

Other notables included the work of Valery Lippens who took a vast number of aerial shots at Kings Cross and Liverpool Street station during rush hour. He then shrunk each print and combined them to create a large canvas composed of 378 images. The total effect seen from a distance makes us commuters look like industrious insects. Not a shockingly new idea but one that makes sense wherever it is found.

You couldn’t really accuse the above two works of being uplifting and this dour view of the modern world persisted with Gemma Gallagher’s A Terrible Beauty is Born – a painting of machine guns and Tessa Whitehead‘s gloomy vision of what appeared to be an empty swimming pool, created by applying layer after layer of paint. When I mentioned the doom element to Merlin Fulcher, photographer for the evening and program director of Platform One Gallery, Wandsworth’s station museum, he said, ‘huh. Maybe that says something about the dark side of Crystal’.

And maybe the last words should go to Ms Bennes. Asked what she wanted to come out of her project, she said, ‘I want millions of people to think “I can do this”. I want Salons to pop up everywhere.’

Salon London took place at:

295 Regent Street
Soho
W1B 2JH

The website

Salon Private View Images
Copyright Merlin Fulcher, 2009