The Royal Academy Schools Show 2022

RA, London, 17 June - 3 July 2022

Painting, performance, sex with robots: the outgoing students of the Royal Academy Schools give the people what they want. While varied in media, the work is mature and concise, suggesting that the students on this prestigious program have a good deal of confidence. And none more so that Catinca Malamaire, whose installation and performance take centre stage and, for better or for worse, unite the whole show with an undeniable gravitational pull. 

The performance takes place in a room full of an orange glow, where two screens show the artist striking a series of poses in a red and white leather jumpsuit, standing on metal shelving units in a huge, empty warehouse. The artist emerges IRL in the same jumpsuit and goes to stand behind a plastic screen at one side of the room. Another performer follows. Deadpan, they pass each other an eight-armed, folding LED light, and move slowly across the room. A soundtrack produces a sense of dread. At one point Malamaire lies on her back and holds the light over her in a coital position – Leda and the electric octopus –  while the dancer tries to prise it off, jealous. 

It's weird, a little predictably weird. Solemnity, slow movement and inscrutability are tropes of performance art, here put to work in what is essentially a narrative dance. In a performance entirely reliant on physical movement, a charismatic professional might be better suited as the lead, to captivate the audience with their motion alone; the more esoteric ideas can follow. As it stands, the work is admirably ambitious but, oddly enough, too conventional. 

Paradoxically, more innovation is happening in the antiquated medium of painting. Three painters propose different ways it can be relevant. For Sofía Clausse, the answer is in historicization. In her tight-knit installation, abstract painting and collage resonate formally with each other across the gallery, while a diagram on the wall evokes semiotics. Inside a dark side room, a lightbulb illuminates a drawer of ceramic keys, like a step into the days of structural anthropology, where intellectuals hashed out the oppositions that underlie cultural meaning: light/dark, inside/outside, raw/cooked, etc. The installation situates abstraction within this matrix, but, structuralism by now being out of date, it also risks confining it to the past. 

Pascal Sender looks to the future and the interaction of painting with new technology. A tablet dangles in the middle of an installation of several paintings that look as though they have been generated by some kind of artificial intelligence. Point the camera at them and they wobble around on the screen and change, accompanied by sounds. In this proposition, painting takes on new life within augmented reality. But viewed on a screen, the viscous medium of paint steps back and begs the question: what use does the post-human have for handmade objects hung on the wall?

Like Clausse, Emmanuel Awuni strikes an anthropological note, but is more concerned with the poetics of conservation than with systems of meaning. A West African-style ceramic head is suspended in a large piece of blue foam, mounted vertically on the wall like a painting. Simultaneously cushioned and precarious, it produces an extraordinary tension that echoes the fate of many objects in museum archives: physically safe but whose cultural significance is at risk. Abstract painting undergoes a similar process: a large painted canvas is charred and burnt around the edges as if snatched from fire, simulating an endangered past and presenting that as the aesthetic object. Awuni situates abstract painting in relation to museological and colonial histories of artefacts: a manoeuvre altogether of the present.