Andrew Holmes 2

Andrew Holmes pictures are really quite extraordinary. You stand there and feel your head moving towards the surface of the paper. They are quite big, and you are sort of sucked in, and your eyes go all screwy losing and regaining focus, until your nose is about to bash in to them, then you recoil in horror that you might actually touch one, and then you are drawn in once again, unbelieving. For those interested in mark making, his pictures are the equivalent of CSI Las Vegas. They are hypnotic.
There are thirteen of them on show in the gallery (see below) in Chelsea, and a snip at £16,000 each, you've have thought the best thing that Ashley Cole could possibly do would be to buy the lot with his pocket money and dig out his basement garage in to some contemporary version of the Pazzi chapel - a long thin white space I am imagining, quite unashamedly Grand Designs, and show them off as one. They would certainly show up his car.
I'm not joking about a chapel, Andrew calls his latest work the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. They are pictures of the end of autopia, and the last (he said to me) he will do in colour. That's Andrew for you to a tee. The last he will do in colour.
There is something demonic, something eminence gris, about him, and there was a very nervous looking photographer there who looked as if he was suddenly placed in the presence of the antichrist, muttering things like 'I really must understand more...' to himself over and over again as he fiddled with his suddenly insignificant digital camera. Andrew is after all the kind of artist, like Gericault, who once in his studio, famously doesn't say a word to anybody, doesn't notice anything else at all, once for three weeks solid.
The congregation, clergy, gathered last night were indeed no doubt top rank of a certain architectural scene, a scene that would probably have employed Andrew back in the day for all their dirty work- the renderings that he was famous for, and the kind of scene that might still use the word scene. The man who's name I can never remember who always wears red from Richard Rogers was there, wearing red. Why he always wears red somebody, probably Andrew, will eventually tell me. It was all most peculiar, they looked, well, sort of 'beaky' as a collection.....alert, entitled, vaguely unpleasant, those elders of the High Tech and the AA, the men behind things, all finely tuned to their position in life, a secret society somehow before you, stroking the palm. It made me quite queasy, a generation below, a generation comparatively in rags and accomplishing rather little, but then I don't get out to West London much and, lets face it, it's a different world, and it always appalls me.
Go see, absorb it all, before we all die!