Matthew James Holman

Consider the trees of the lake. What lichens grow in that flurried encampment of burnt umber and electric blue, with those branches skirting up from the water to the sky? What forms of cloud formations are these: cumulus or alto? How to make sense of that cauldron of fire, burning deep and dark, and which the naturalist might call the sandbank, irradiating in the foreground? In Ella Wright’s Uprooted, we find nature lost in a state of revelation. Yes, these are the trees of the lake, but this is a vision of an arcadian world reimagined in pendulous colour; reworked, transformed, transmuted. It is no longer the trees of the lake. ‘To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances’, as John Berger once said: ‘a drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at.’ As we enter Wright’s haven of forms, these are paintings of trees being looked at, and revelling in the unique exaltation of sharing in that looking with a stranger. @ellacwright Unsteady Ground, now on show @cedricbardawil

Megan Rooney’s Blue Fortnight @plastermagazine As a ten-month winter breaks into glorious summer, I travelled to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (@kettlesyard ) to speak to Megan Rooney, who has just made a gigantic four-wall mural about the seasons. The first thing I want to find out? How a spider seduced a moth 📸 @camilla_greenwell

@jess.sometimes and I wrote on The Future of Loneliness (@guts_gallery ), curated by @mia.merilu , for @ocula.art Special shout-out to @thomascameronart & @jaygardenjung More than 80 years since Edward Hopper painted his iconic image of contemporary American life, Olivia Laing wrote that ‘[w]e long for contact and it makes us afraid… [b]ut as long as we’re still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.’ If critics and commentators have presumed that the future will be a lonely place, then these artists offer recuperative models for intimacy in Laing’s sense of the word.. This isolation is often thought to be driven by new aspects of digital existence that result in less social forms of living and intimacy, as well as more collective forms of withdrawal. The Future of Loneliness revisits these anxieties whilst resisting cliche visual signifiers about failed connection. These are works that portray loneliness as stranger than we suspected: hyperreal in Lisa Liljeström’s Never Been Sacred and Tell the Truth (both 2024)—lime acrylic screenshots of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)—and hypnotic in Kate Burling’s Evaporation of Turbines (2024), where curvaceous propellers emerge out of an orange seascape that suggests? a dystopian future. It all feels at once distinctly familiar and a little different to how it has been envisaged before. The show affords an irresolute picture as to whether our lonely future is a space of delight or terror; it is vibrantly, and a little ecstatically, both.

I spoke to @corbinshaww on his new project “GOD SAVE THE TEAM”, currently on a billboard near you, for @theartnewspaper.official … Inspired by the travelling fans who write their own messages of support and local allegiances onto Saint George’s flags, and which will decorate the stands at tonight’s England fixture against Slovenia in Cologne, Shaw has repurposed the national flag with the words: ‘GOD SAVE THE TEAM.’ As the cross of Saint George, a Turkish-born Roman soldier who died in Palestine, symbolises for some a darker side to patriotism, Shaw believes that ‘this England team are a real source of pride and feel representative of a diverse nation: they are genuinely likeable, and feel like the lads I went to school with.’ Now online.

Remembering Richard Serra, now online @theartnewspaper.official

Remembering Frank Stella, now online @theartnewspaper.official

“It’s like a scene from ‘Below Deck’ envisioned by Gustave Courbet, if Courbet had a telescopic lens to prepare his pictures. These are paintings of elite luxury that never make it look like it’s worth having. It looks like hard work.” I wrote on work, wealth and painting on the French Riviera, featuring the brilliant @rexsouthwick_artist @ @kristymchanart for @plastermagazine

I interviewed @chaosursfischer on gardens, sculpture, and fearlessness. Now online @theartnewspaper.official as Urs’ new book, Monumental Sculpture, is released at Art Basel.

Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

My friend Tang Shuo’s exhibition opens this evening at Beers London — what a storyteller Our book, Shadows of Boulder Hill, is out later this month. Pre-order on the @hurtwoodbooks website @gltangshuo @beerslondon

A joyous week celebrating @secretcircuit ‘s show at @cedricbardawil

I’m in the back of a Toyota Prius on the A6010 Manchester Inner Ring Road. It’s been pissing it down for the last 20 minutes but is now easing off. As my driver pulls up to our destination, I look through damp streaks of mizzle on the window and behold the sprawling Maple Industrial Estate complex. I’ve been waiting for this moment for months. To the uninitiated eye, this place won’t look like much. The crosshatch of open concrete and cheap-brick architecture is just like any of the unremarkable estates in this neighbourhood in Ardwick, central Manchester. It’s slightly grim and certainly cold, a remnant of the city’s dwindling industrial base. But over the past three years, Maple has become a centre for British painting. As figurative art has enjoyed a resurgence in museums and markets over recent years, a particular current of hyper-real surfaces, populated by often strange, macabre and disturbing references to Old Masters and gore, has emerged in paintings by a younger generation in the North West. From London’s crisis of studio space to the widespread closure of the country’s art schools, I have a hunch that the tight-knit group working behind these walls have some secrets to share. As the sun peeked out from the clouds, and with a sense of early-career collective action in the air, I went in to find out. My piece on the Ardwick artists out now on @plastermagazine @tommyharrisonn @louise___giovanelli @robinmegannity @_nina_chua @_nicola_ellis_ @richarddeanhughes @_aliceamati @ian.hartshorne Image: Timon Benson @timonbenson Art Direction: Alexander Luc @a.luc Assistant: Henry Collier @henryjamescollier