The Missing: Rebuilding the Past

Piers’s exhibition at Jessica Carlisle, 4 Mandeville Place was featured in Paul’s Art World:

What’s just the second show in Jessica Carlisle’s handsome permanent space is a timely artistic response to the iconoclasm in Syria. It effects a mournful tone which nonetheless mines the uncomfortable aesthetic attraction which ruins acquire. Piers Secunda consistently operates in that area, as in his head with and without casts of bullet holes from a frontline Iraqi village; less expectedly, Matteo Barzini’s impactful reportage film The Quake, 2015, features a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone which wrests a haunting beauty from the noise of destruction. Turning to reconstruction of sorts, Syrian refugee Tmam Aikhidaiwi Alnabilsi replicates a now-damaged mosque, and the Institute of Digital Archeology shows the maquette for what will soon become a full-size 3D print of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra in Trafalgar Square. Add three more artists, including James Brooks’ poignant classically-infected meditations*, and the range impresses.