Showcasing much of the work created by the five original Fitzrovia Noir artists –  Graham Carrick, Pamela Furness, Garry Hunter, Peter Mackertich and Lucieta Williams – at The Middlesex Hospital earlier that year, this testbed led onto a much larger show at Château d’Alba, in Spring 2009, translated into French as Désintégration Exquise. Unusually we included a text piece, originally gifted from writer John Hind to accompany the visual art, but it was so good, we included it as a work in itself, displayed in the gallery. It begins:

Although it would be a great way for NASA to embarrass those who insist humans never travelled to the Moon, there is no telescope yet in existence (including Hubble) able to zoom in enough to see machinery on the lunar surface, never mind smaller items and boot prints left in their vicinities. But the understanding is that, short of intervention by asteroids, the likes of moon rovers and a Polaroid of Charlie Duke’s family, do and will remain perfectly preserved on the Moon, for us to focus on sometime in the future. When a powerful enough telescope becomes available, these objects will give a big finger to the erosion experienced by things in Earth’s atmosphere. Thus any Earthling artist making use of such a telescope would have to exhibit a different aesthetic to that found in this exhibition. There would still be grey shapes to frame and bleakness to capture. But decay would be as lacking as life…

Project Title
Exquisite Decay

Location
The Whitecross Gallery, London EC1

Curation
Graham Carrick for Fitzrovia Noir

Production
Francesco Petillo and Helen Murphy for The Whitecross Gallery

Film
Alexandra Buhl

Artists

Media
Collage, drawing, painting, photography, text

Dates
August 2008-April 2009

Museo Riojano de arte contemporaneo (MURAC), Logroño, Spain