This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Stamping me out
I have a fun little file stored on my phone, titled “Fucker Stamped My Passport”. Brexit may have provided no discernible benefits for anyone but a handful of hedgies, but it has added an exciting element of risk to passing through immigration at Marco Polo airport.
I have been resident in Italy since 2018, and have the biometric ID card to prove it, but I’m also obliged to carry an embossed certificate proving the date of my application and another card with my fiscal code. Nonetheless, half the time the passport bloke (it’s always a man), refuses to accept the evidence and stamps the document, meaning in principle that I have no right to return home for a few months.
So then we have the row, where I produce the official protocol stored on my phone, he tells me I don’t know what I’m talking about and I have to bite my tongue or risk being thrown off the flight to London. When, as rarely happens, he does concede my point, a black line is drawn in Biro through the erroneous stamp. So reassuring, so reliable, so so worth it.
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Still, London always provides an adrenaline jolt of a better kind. I’ve become such a country mouse that even whizzing about on the Tube feels exciting. I rattled up to Islington for the opening of the London Art Fair, which this year was heavy on a personal favourite, British mid-century painters, including Roger Hilton and Keith Vaughan and some wonderfully majestic seascapes by Dame Barbara Rae.
The number of pictures of Venice was curious — sometimes I forget how much the city is part of the imagination of the world, and how universally present its image is. Think of the announcement of Queen Elizabeth’s death, made before a huge Canaletto canvas in St James’s Palace — once you start looking, Venice is everywhere. Rounding a stand to yet another view of the Canal Grande (no-one says Canalazzo) was disarming. I can never quite believe that I live there.
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Anora lorra laughs
My London fix also included a feast of chilli wonton at the brilliant Three Uncles in Brixton Market, followed by Sean Baker’s extraordinary film Anora at the Ritzy. The story of a Brighton Beach stripper who marries a Russian oligarch’s son, it’s fantastically raw and funny, but also heartbreakingly captures the hectic exuberance of young love. Mikey Madison’s Oscar-nominated lead expresses the ache of hope and the bleakness of resignation as poignantly as a Renaissance sonnet. I cried so much I couldn’t finish my Revels.
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Don’t read the label
Back to the lagoon with my scribbled-on passport to meet Thierry Morel, the curator of A Cabinet of Wonders at the Palazzo Grimani. The show recreates a seventeenth-century Wunderkammer, mixing pieces from the George Loudon collection, on public display for the first time, with paintings, bronzes, tapestries and furniture. A flayed turkey in papier mâché, ceramic fruits and flowers arrested mid-decay on a hay-strewn floor give the rooms an air of mischievous mystery, like an alchemist’s study.
Morel has eschewed both casings and labels, asserting that “curiosity should be borne out of objects”, a bold curatorial gesture, but one which will hopefully be followed. The art-speak on most contemporary show labels has become so impenetrable that some galleries are offering a “simple language” alternative: letting works speak for themselves has become a radical gesture.
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January is an empty month in Venice, but February opened with a slew of new exhibitions. Suddenly everyone was out, meeting on the bridges on their way to or from the next big thing. London’s vastness can be thrilling, but Venice’s proximity of quality is unbeatable when it comes to art — in one night I was able to see Seven Skies for Venice, a grouping of dreamy, delicate abstracts by Anna Peter-Breton at Magazzino Gallery, hop over the Accademia to Victoria Miro for Skin on Skin by Saskia Colwell and catch a vaporetto over to San Polo for Moonkillers at the recently opened Tommaso Calabro gallery at the gloriously gothic Palazzo Donà Brusa.
The two latter engage with the reclamation of figurative art so much in evidence at last year’s Biennale: exquisite drawings in charcoal at Miro, and a show of five young Venetian artists at Calabro — deceptively naïve landscapes and portraits in a shout against art world snobbery. No labels to be seen.
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Art of glass
Barovier & Toso might be one of the oldest companies in the world, founded on Murano in 1295. Crystal was invented there by Angelo Barovier in the mid-fifteenth century, and the firm is still producing it in the mano volante (freehand) style, each piece taking three days to complete.
Barovier & Toso Arte is one of Venice’s most exciting new initiatives, aiming to combine centuries of expertise with advanced technologies to create new multidisciplinary works in glass. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of Glass Art in Dialogue, featuring new pieces by Marija Jaensch and Amy Thai, opening at the restored Water Hall of Palazzo Barovier.
February also means Carnival, the grim week-long attempt by the Comune to persuade tourists to party like it’s 1797. There is one thing that’s still sexy though — fritelle. These dun-coloured fried doughnuts, wartily studded with apple and raisin, are filled with whipped cream, lemon-scented crema or zabaione, custard’s slutty big sister. Visually unprepossessing, but then you bite, and it’s like sliding the knickers off a Titian Venus.
