Heart and Soul
60 Long Lane, London
Rating: * * * * *
The perfume of roses hangs in the air of a Southwark warehouse where a giant yellow insect crawls across the floor. A Rubik's cube hangs overhead and a monster made of brown tape walks up the wall. There's a painting of a cat and a drawing of a flat. There are 40 works by 40 artists, but nobody presses a manifesto into your hand claiming this is the new ism.
This was the year when British art seemed to curdle, when you could almost hear Charles Saatchi sighing with ennui as he looked for the latest art movement. Which is why Heart and Soul is the most exciting group show by young British artists in ages.
In a London art scene where even Sotheby's holds contemporary auctions in warehouses, this particular warehouse show manages to reconnect the cables and generate a spark. It's to do with rhetoric, or rather the invisibility of rhetoric.
There's no sense of artists being hammered into an argument. What there is, from the moment you smell those roses, is the sense of a living art scene rather than one that has been bought up and processed. Mark Titchner's greeny-yellowy-blue cube hangs surreally in space, like a fragment of an Escher drawing, above a tiny painting of flowers by Gill Carnegie and Brian Griffiths' crawling polystyrene space bug.
A flower arrangement by Polly Staple announces the decorative qualities shared by many works in this exhibition, resplendently exemplified by Michael Raedecker's painting, a violet blotch from a distance, up close a furry, soft growth of tendrils waving on a sea bed, Ewan Gibbs' drawing of strange goings-on in a bedsit is beguiling, and a huge sloppy painting of a cat by Martin Maloney is very funny, lending an Abstract Expressionist scale to a silly subject.
Heart and Soul is like looking at the art of a very happy society that doesn't yet exist. This is why its decorative prettiness is subversive rather than chic; you can't get this stuff in Habitat because it comes from the future. Miserable art can be reactionary, confirming the prison of things as they are. The pleasure of this show makes you feel anything is possible. The colours and perfumes generate a surprise that is infectious and full of unresolved energy.
Kirsten Berkeley has made three sculptures called Imaginary Lovers, different coloured plastic forms caressing each other on top of stools. The Imaginary Lovers include Jean Brodie and Robert Burns, Charles Babbage and John Cage, Belle de Jour and Eliza Doolittle - unlikely unions that typify the imagination of an exhibition that makes British art feel exciting again.
Till September 12. Details: 0171-275 7629.
