Razzle Dazzle – Salon Vert: And There Was…

Sinta Tantra at Salon Vert

Adjacent to the temporary tents and trumpets of Frieze Art Fair a new exhibition and project space, Salon Vert, opened with a group exhibition And There Was… featuring Edwin Burdis, Ingolv Helland, Steve Rosenthal, Sinta Tantra and Margarita Trushina. A collaboration by five international artists and Salon Vert, which “through juxtaposition and dialogue of multi-media works offers the artists’ response to the space and exploration into the motifs of ownership, performance, deconstruction, the personal and the universal in the urban metropolis and inner spaces within architecture, homes and our selves.” 14 October – 30 October 2010.

The Nash Terrace House designed by John Nash (1752-1835) retains some initial decorative architectural features of fireplaces, cornices and ceiling roses and has added opulent glass chandeliers but has otherwise become a white-walled blank canvas for ideas. The ground floor drawing room resembles a Dazzle painting by Edward Wadsworth. Sinta Tantra’s  Universe of Objects in Archive, Arsenic and Railings is a wall painting in Farrow and Ball’s 18^th century heritage palette of pale sea green, black and cream that lifts the perspective vertically like the energy of a released spring and pulses horizontally around the room in endless optical trigonometric fugue.

The room is shared by Steve Rosenthal’s Self Portrait – Vitruvian Narcissus, a 6’ diameter circular mirror surrounded by lights resembling a theatrical make-up mirror that plays with the ideas illusion, gazing and self-image inherent to the mirror, and  related to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man showing the human body inscribed in the circle and a square.

Margaret Trushina’s Echo Sculptures are polished and folded metal based on Suprematist constructions. Her site-specific installation In the Middle of Nowhere set in the back patio of the house is a walk-through polished steel pavilion with an element of the reflecting and distorting fairground mirror that “tests our spatial and psychological boundaries creating a metallic liquid gate guides the viewer up into the ‘Neverland’.” Referencing the never-ending childhood illusion of Peter Pan’s island and the adult confusion of The Neverland Ranch of Michael Jackson.

Ingolv Helland’s installation in the first floor grand salon was installation, painting and video projection drawing material from ‘Quatrocenti’ painting and Tarkovsky’s films.

Salon Vert is a new art space in a private house among the Nash Terraces in Regent’s Park, London, promoting established and emerging international artists through an exhibition programme including commissioned and site-specific works.