Five free exhibitions currently on display in London commercial galleries offer everything from fragmented memories and explosive colour to cold war paranoia and hyper-erotic intimacy. The shows, reviewed in a new series covering free-entry art spaces, range from a Mexican conceptualist's disjointed installations to a young painter's sensual pastels.
Gabriel Orozco: Chronotopic at White Cube Bermondsey
Walking into Gabriel Orozco's show is like waking up with a headache and trying to piece together whatever you did last night. Everything in the Mexican conceptualist's exhibition is splintered and disjointed, a history you cannot make sense of. A round of applause greets visitors, but the ovation morphs into the sound of rain. Recognisable things – cars, a football, cigarettes – are suspended mid-air, broken into pieces, or flipped upside down. An old Citroën has been split in half and glued back together too small, too narrow. The show includes kids' toys and games, ceiling fans twirling with rolls of toilet paper attached to their blades, and tree branches sprouting cigarette butts.
Many artists deal with memory and the passing of time, but few capture its slipperiness like Orozco. The whole show feels as if it is about history, stripped of big names and important dates, leaving fragmented memories instead. It is all a bit too ephemeral, dense and self-satisfied, as if he cannot stop patting himself on the back for being so clever. But that does not mean it is not good – it is odd, discomfiting art that makes you feel you are about to forget your pin number. The exhibition runs until 8 November.
Mary Ramsden: The Feeling of What Happens at Pilar Corrias
Mary Ramsden's huge new abstracts open with big washy swathes of colour – one canvas all neon pink and green lost in a haze of deep purple, another all mauve and lilac in a vastness of blue. They are explosive bursts of hue and tone, totally mesmerising, abstraction at its abstractest. But look longer, and flower petals or shafts of daylight through window slats emerge. Everything is constantly pulled between abstraction and reality, each work vacillating between still life and colourfield experimentation.
Years ago, Ramsden painted love hearts over and over, as if abstracting her teenage diaries. Then she did the same to interior scenes of living rooms and furniture. Now nature has crept in. She says these works are about the limits of consciousness and perception, but what makes the show so good is its total, obsessive, overwhelming dedication to colour. The exhibition runs until 7 November.
Martine Syms: Knot Eye at Sadie Coles HQ
Martine Syms' show at Sadie Coles HQ is about brand Syms – literally, there is a concept store of Syms merch, books and candles on the ground floor. But it is about that idea in a wider societal sense too, about how we are all brands: personalities constructed for display, amalgams of fiction, memory, capitalism and pop culture. Two films upstairs explore this theme. In the newest piece, three people at an afterparty talk about DMT and interdimensional travel; one starts tripping while the others fall asleep, and reality and fantasy crash together without being pulled apart. The other film follows a teenager obsessed with an early 2000s reality star, an obsession that makes it impossible to distinguish a real person from the character they portray.
None of it is brilliantly acted or scripted, but it sends you out into the street with a head full of questions. Syms lives in a world where the lines between who we are, who society wants us to be, and who we present to the world are constantly blurred. The exhibition runs until 7 November.
Colin Self: Unseen at Frith Street Gallery
Colin Self stands out from other pop artists of his generation for an overwhelming atmosphere of paranoia and dread. While others tackled consumerism and fame, Self dealt with the aftermath of the second world war and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the cold war. A grinning face hangs by a thread as a Nazi bomb flies past in one work; a dog bares its teeth in front of a battery of missiles in another. He sculpts a war plane out of nails and fake leopard fur, and creates a portrait of a man made of saws, knives, springs and tools. It is atomic terror in a newly mechanised society perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation.
Self is still making work at 85. Newer landscape paintings show his native East Anglia as a bleak place filled with broken caravans and bomb craters. None of the more recent work is brilliant, but it is all still marked by that terror and dread. The exhibition runs until 7 November.
Somaya Critchlow: Pastels at Maximillian William
Critchlow's erotic portraits have always been marked by a palpable sense of threat. The young English painter's coquettish, 70s soft-focus nudes locked eyes with the viewer aggressively, as if on the verge of punching your lights out or throttling you with their negligees. But in this exhibition – her first since showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery last year – the threat is absent. Instead, in these tiny, ultra-intimate pastels, Critchlow luxuriates in form. These are unabashed celebrations of sensuality, nudity and eroticism.
The figures are still confident and confrontational, but Critchlow seems to be enjoying herself more, letting things be sensual for their own sake without being weighed down by anger and revenge. The implication of violence is missed, but they are still really good, hyper-erotic, intimate images. They could also just be lulling you into a sense of false security – so watch your back. The exhibition runs until 14 November.
