Arthur Tonnerre

Art Journalist

Author: Arthur Tonnerre

  • Fanglin Luo

    Fanglin Luo

    How contemporary artist Fanglin Luo channels Aphrodite and Nvwa (Nüwa) to question feminine identity and cultural power

    “hrough the lens we see a dancer in front of a fence. There is a wind-tussled sheet hanging behind her. The sound of crashing waves intensifies as the dancer starts to rise from a crouch and into a series of movements, sometimes balletic, sometimes frantic. On the sheet a circle of flowers moves with quick balletic movements. Part performance, part statement, there is something here that is struggling to be understood. Is this itself the message?

    Multidisciplinary artist Fanglin Luo’s work takes viewers on a broad journey through ritual femininity and exploratory performance art. These are universal themes that she interprets through performance works that restage powerful cultural archetypes as a form of resistance against patriarchal tropes. But history has deep roots and not all of them bear sweet fruit. The question viewers face is whether her myth (re)making marks true growth.”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Fanglin Luo
    Arthur Tonnerre – Fanglin Luo
  • Dürer to Warhol

    Dürer to Warhol

    A review of ‘Albrecht Dürer To Andy Warhol Masterpieces…’ MASI Lugano

    “Amidst the diversity of the showcased works, some spectators may be lured into issuing grandiose proclamations on the pivotal role of print reproduction within the annals of art history. However, this exhibition transcends the mere thematic or physical consolidation but unfolds as a rare juncture inviting an immersive plunge into the profundity of genius, casting shadows potent enough to obscure the aspirations of contemporary and future art.”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Dürer & Warhol
    Arthur Tonnerre – Dürer & Warhol
  •  Jamieson Webster

     Jamieson Webster

    Lacan, Art and the situated natured of viewing. An interview with Jamieson Webster

    “It’s complicated. Because I feel with each artist, I do something different. I’m a writer, and a psychoanalytic theorist, and I am a professor at The New School. So on the one hand I work theoretically and then on the other hand, I have a clinical practice and a clinical ear. It’s a combination of the two that I bring to the table but I feel that with every artist something different comes up. In my mind it’s not that I psychoanalyse the artists, rather I do something different with each one.”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Jamieson Webster
    Arthur Tonnerre – Jamieson Webster
  • Folkestone Trienniale

    Folkestone Trienniale

    How artists transform a seaside town into a living gallery of environmental urgency, historical memory, and collective imagination

    “Their vision of the festival marries contemporary concerns with artistic flourish and remains true to the idea of ‘treating the town like a gallery’. One of the most interesting aspects of Folkestone is how artists embed their works within the town’s context. Where we expect to see artworks in the white cube of the gallery experience, here the locations and their discovery reverberate with power that imparts a sense of magical realism. The expected world redevelops into perfect settings for artistic vision. Often it takes the form of subtle language or communication; the act of walking and discovering each location assumes a potent frequency. While it remains possible to reduce each artwork by intention and execution, the overwhelming installation feeling of the triennial lingers with visitors. All artists attempted location-based work that used the symbolism of their settings to create an immanent frame for what they wanted to convey.”

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    Arthur Tonnnerre - Folkestone Trienniale 2025
    Arthur Tonnnerre – Folkestone Trienniale 2025
  • Jingjing Xu

    Jingjing Xu

    A critical look at an emerging artist‘s synthesis of cinematic language, symbolic narrative, and questions of authenticity

    “This generation of artists also encourages reflection on how they differ from their predecessors. Figures such as Nam June Paik, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola and Dara Birnbaum once examined the materiality of media from a McLuhanesque perspective, questioning what television is, what cinema can do and how media shape consumption. In contrast, contemporary artists like Xu employ cinematic language with native fluency. Having grown up in an era defined by memes, social media and promotional imagery, they create within a visual vocabulary already saturated with commercial aesthetics, auteur cinema and representational ideology.”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Jingjing Xu web
    Arthur Tonnerre – Jingjing Xu web
  • Simon Tayler

    Simon Tayler

    Exploring the Mysterious Beauty of Organic Forms in Contemporary British Sculpture

    “Tayler’s practice explores the delicate threshold between the organic and the mechanical, the stable and the unstable, the material and the imagined. Working primarily in wood, he employs an incremental, mathematical process of construction—each adjustment dictating whether a curve extends outward or folds back upon itself. The resulting forms are intricate, fluid, 2 and 3 dimensionally charged with a quirky naturalism.

    In Flux, these curving trajectories become metaphors for states of mind: thoughts that cohere with clarity, or else knot and tighten under tension. Tayler’s sculptures are grounded by their points of contact with the floor or wall, yet they seem to listen, transmit, and extend beyond themselves—as if mediating between the inner and outer world.”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Simon Tayler - Art Criticism
    Arthur Tonnerre – Simon Tayler – Art Criticism
  • Milan 2025

    Milan 2025

    A review of miart and Milan Art Week 2025 

    “For the 2025 edition Rauschenberg isa pivot point for showcasing both painting and multimedia art, the link between modernist art of the 1940s and the individuation which franks contemporary art. Mixed media and conceptual, there are a lot of signifiers in Rauschenberg’s works that anticipated where art would eventually move and several galleries around Milan are showcasing his works as if they were created yesterday. As a celebration of his centenary year the 2025 ninth edition of miart assembles museum exhibitions, talks and projects reflecting Rauschenberg’s ahead-of-his-time commitment to collaboration and syncretic ideas. The fair’s theme of ‘among friends’ projects this with galleries and institutions working together to enhance the city’s vision for artistic re-growth. A vision that’s coming into sharp focus in 2025, with highlights including John Giorno at the Triennale di Milano (until 14 April), Typologien at Fondazione Prada (14 June), the portal section of the miart (6 April), Nico Vascellari’s Pastoral at Palazzo Reale (2 June) and both Yukinori Yanagi and Tarek Atoui at Pirelli HangarBicocca (27/20 July). “

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Amsterdam Art Week 2025
    Arthur Tonnerre – Amsterdam Art Week 2025
  • Amsterdam 2025

    Amsterdam 2025

    Why getting lost in Amsterdam Art Week might be the only way to find what matters

    Amsterdam Art Week crystallises this experience across the phases of the day, from the sunlit work of the Rijksakademie, to the afternoon glamour of the major gallery shows, and trailing off with the personal delights of night-time rambles through the central district with this plethora of small galleries tempting the passer-by with window displays of restrained promise. It’s within the specificities of each moment that we can approach the larger questions: what makes Amsterdam a good site for art? 2025 is a political year so how is that reflected in Amsterdam’s art? Signs of growth, signs of life? What’s next?”

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    Arthur Tonnerre - Amsterdam
    Arthur Tonnerre – Amsterdam
  • Wanting Wang

    Wanting Wang

    The London-based photographer Wanting Wang uses friction and fragmentation to question what we consider normal

    “The influence of Sarah Lucas and Mona Hatoum hovers over Wang’s visual language, though the connection is conceptual rather than stylistic. Both artists transformed domestic objects into sites of strangeness and political charge, a quality that resonated deeply with Wang when she first encountered their work during her studies at the University of the Arts London. Reflecting on that encounter, she recalls, “The domestic was no longer soft or safe, it was charged, strange, and political. That tension stayed with me.” This awakening manifests throughout her practice, where familiar objects and environments are rendered unsettling through careful displacement and visual intervention.”

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  • Paul Sietsema

    Paul Sietsema

    Preview article on exhibition by Paul Sietsema

    “Sietsema’s current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery demonstrates this practice in full maturity. The new works on the ground floor (with their unplugged rotary telephones and paint-soaked CDs) exist as archaeological artefacts of our own recent past, whilst the earlier pieces in the basement reveal the artist’s commitment to excavating the material memory embedded in cultural objects. Together, they confirm Sietsema as one of contemporary art’s most rigorous investigators of how meaning accretes through the physical residue of use, time, and exchange. In an era defined by the dematerialised circulation of images, his insistence on the thereness of objects (their weight, their decay, their indexical traces) offers a counterpoint, reminding us that even in reproduction, something material remains.”