A darkish floor, suspended on two metallic cables, stretched from flooring to ceiling. Seen from a distance, it’d seem as a monochrome. A clean, deep house—with gloomy, blueish tones. As your gaze sharpens, particulars emerge: markings, an icon. 00:00. A seven-segment show—a part employed to characterize decimal numerals and alphabetic characters, identified for its use in digital clocks, calculators, microwaves, and different digital units. A relic from the longer term. It’s a brand new portray by Francesco João: Untitled (SSD), acrylic, vinyl, gouache on uncooked canvas.
You’re in London. It’s July 4th, 2025. Simply days in the past, temperatures within the metropolis soared to 37.4°C—the very best recorded anyplace in Britain this yr. The Met Workplace declared it “just about sure” that the heatwave was pushed by international warming.
You progress by the rooms of an unfurnished apart- ment at 91 Nice Russell Road, changed into a gallery for up to date artwork. On the white partitions, a sequence of two-dimensional photos varieties a sort of horizontal punctuation. A psychological panorama. Newer work by João—once more that includes seven-segment shows—this time layered over a reddish, summary background: a sky in flames, a dramatic celestial house.
The works are interspersed with a gaggle of small charcoal drawings on paper by Robert Longo, framed in thick black wood frames, beneath glass. Jones / Dolphin in Tank JM7, J- Bone Transmission JM13, Johnny Lodge JM21—all from 1993. Visible research and storyboards for Johnny Mnemonic, Longo’s debut function movie—a dystopian cyberpunk thriller primarily based on a 1981 quick story by science fiction maverick William Gibson, who additionally wrote the screenplay.
Set within the yr 2021, the movie stars Keanu Reeves as Johnny, a black-market information courier with a cybernetic implant in his mind. When the data he carries exceeds his reminiscence capability and threatens his life, he should ship it inside 48 hours—whereas being hunted by company assassins and legal syndicates.
Underlying the work of each artists, a situation the place politics is liquified into information streams and human beings are lowered to overloaded interfaces.
Longo is famend for his monumental, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings that study the creation of symbols tied to energy and authority. Drawing inspiration from Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, he investigates the impression of an image-saturated tradition—how we soak up, interpret, and bear in mind the fixed stream of visible stimuli.
João was all the time “ within the relationship between transcendence and economics.” His SSD sequence is a metaphor of a perpetual current, a brief circuit, a return to the “zero diploma” of portray, a distinct segment of resistance in the direction of a type of energy exercised by algorithmic prediction. Artwork as an anomaly, a system error, a blackout of automation.
Energy failures and information losses are a recurring and highly effective theme in cyberpunk fiction. In a hyper-connected, tech-dominated world, a blackout is extra than simply darkness—it’s vulnerability. It’s a political act. A blinking SSD show, again to 00:00.
—Alessio Ascari
at Scorching Wheels, London
till August 2, 2025
