London's new vitalism

REVIEW: Power & Intimacy

Certain aspects of the political realignment sweeping Europe and America are now well understood. Worship of the other and the ruling ethos of self-denial have been clearly rejected, but what comes in their place remains confused. The new right remains understandably preoccupied with immediate political concerns, without much reflection on deeper questions of meaning and purpose. In Britain, the impulse to make the nation ‘great again’ is strong, but too often our understanding of what this means beyond restoring annual productivity growth is lacking.

Such questions can be explored philosophically, but words are often insufficient to express the innermost drives of a people or a movement, and therefore limit our ability to imagine alternative possibilities. As Lola Salem recently observed in The Critic, the broader cultural dimension of this new movement remains conspicuously neglected. The new right, for all its political energy, has yet to seriously concern itself with art as a tool for elucidating new meanings and the bedrock upon which shared standards and the possibility of judgement are built.

Meanwhile, established sensibilities are enervated, stripped of all resonance. The consequences of this can be seen in visitor figures at Britain’s leading cultural institutions. Tate Modern’s audience is down 25 percent since 2019; Tate Britain’s is down nearly a third. The National Gallery and the Royal Academy have lost almost half of their visitors. Other institutions are not immune. The Fitzwilliam Museum staged ‘Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition’ earlier this year — a tired exhibition shaped by ideological allegiance rather than aesthetic engagement. It is this error that lies behind the failure of all these institutions. The public’s retreat from these spaces reflects a mounting fatigue with art as cultural messaging, and hints at an as yet unserved market for works grounded in aesthetic seriousness.

The decline of institutional art should not prompt us to abandon the field entirely. Roger Scruton’s reflections provide a compelling rebuke of this tendency: ‘The culture of a civilisation is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.’ Scruton saw art as more than decoration or propaganda: it is a vehicle for reflection, judgment, and truth. It is, above all, the crucible within which societies test and reaffirm distinctions between excellence and mediocrity, truth and falsehood.

When institutions replace aesthetic judgement with ideological commitment, they corrode this vital function. Art ceases to be a space of open encounter and becomes yet another zone of compliance and conformity. The aesthetic sensibility is subjected to rationalised dictations, and cannot provide an independent source of truth. Such degradation is inevitable when the dominant ideological current is characterised not just by an epistemic rejection of aesthetics, but by the active endorsement of the repulsive.

Yet, beyond this malaise, there are the green shoots of a quiet but palpable artistic renewal. Operating outside bureaucratic and ideological strictures, a group of artists are reclaiming the original mission of their craft: the rigorous pursuit of truth through mastery of form and beauty. Their most recent exhibition, Power and Intimacy ran from October 6 to 12 at a pop-up gallery in central London — conceived, funded, and realised entirely independently by the artists themselves.

From the street, a large canvas by Samuel Wild pulled the eye — a figure rising in molten teal and gold, Prometheus hauling fire from the darkness. Inside, twenty-four works by seven artists extended that sense of struggle and renewal across painting, sculpture, and textile.

At the room’s centre stood Fen de Villiers’ plaster sculpture The Tackle — two interlocking figures twisted into a single, muscular mass. The bodies collided and fused in the same instant, their contorted limbs creating a rhythm of compressed motion. Its geometric curvature recalled the energy of Futurism and the structural tension of Duchamp-Villon, but Villiers made the dynamics felt: hands, limbs and a planted foot anchored the collision, so that force — not description — drove the form.

Matthew Mackenzie’s The Tackle took up the same idea in paint. Composed in shards of ochre and bronze, it turned impact into rhythm, the bodies dissolving into the field of their own momentum. The Boxers pushed the theme further: two figures locked together until motion erased distinction, a study in pure energy. Both paintings formed a conversation with Villiers’ work — a translation of sculptural weight into pictorial speed. Howard Markram’s The Archer, a clay relief of a taut figure drawing back his bow, held that same tension at its still point, power gathered and waiting.

These works reached back to an older modernist nerve: the vitalism of Nietzsche and the Vorticists’ belief in what Wyndham Lewis called ‘the crude energy flowing through us’. Villiers took up that same current in his Manifesto for Aesthetic Reinvigoration, calling for ‘a new era of aesthetic vigour’ to replace what he called ‘a monstrous pile of confusing artspeak, cringe-inducing concepts and meaningless images’. For him, the renewal of culture began with form itself: ‘Forms must be explosive, dynamic, inspiring, thrilling—galvanise the spirit of the viewer.’ Where Lewis attacked the effeteness of Edwardian art, Villiers turned his fire on the paralysis of Postmodernism. His argument was that art should stir the blood, not lecture the mind.

That conviction ran through the show. Ferro’s Gryphon Nest, a monumental woven tapestry, carried the same energy in reverse: movement turned inward. The gryphon, normally a symbol of vigilance and hoarding, was reimagined as a guardian of life. Its folded wings and watchful stillness embodied the exhibition’s wider tension between creation and control, strength and care. Villiers gave us the surge of power; Ferro, the form that sustains it.

Where Ferro offered composure, Alexander Adams supplied conscience. His painting Argonaut showed a solitary nude man, back turned to the viewer, facing a dark horizon. Adams called it a ‘manifesto painting’, inspired by Beckmann and dedicated to his dying uncle. In a letter to a friend, he described it as depicting ‘…the challenges a thinking person must endure… the effort, monotony, stamina, courage, ingenuity… when they choose to go beyond cosseted, deracinated life.’ It was both personal and philosophical: an image of endurance, of a man confronting not spectacle but existence itself. Like his recent book How to Start a Dissident Art Movement, it insisted that seriousness — about life, art and meaning — need not apologise for itself.

That seriousness extended beyond the studio. Where the established art world ran on grants, applications, and jargon, this movement operated independently, handling everything themselves — from curation and transport to funding. Theirs was not rebellion for its own sake but a declaration of independence: the self-realisation of the will, without the requirement of external permission. The exhibition’s vitality, in other words, wasn’t only aesthetic but civic — proof that a culture can still generate form without institutional sanction.

This is what made their work genuinely new. Though situated within a recognisable modernist tradition, it was animated by a fresh urgency — a belief that renewal must now come from outside the bureaucracies that once sustained it. In How to Start a Dissident Art Movement, Adams writes, in a chapter titled ‘The Future is Not Read’, that ‘the future of art is not traditionalism’, since, as T. S. Eliot observed, ‘…tradition… springs from a living culture from which serious makers cannot be detached.’ These artists — a loose circle of British and European dissidents — were not reviving the past but reactivating it, turning inherited energy into present life.

The response suggested they’d struck a nerve. The opening was packed: writers, painters, academics, the disenchanted and the curious, all elbowing for a view. The sculptor Michael Sandle was there, as was Prince Leo von Hohenberg — great-grandson of Archduke Franz Ferdinand — in town and evidently intrigued. By the end of the night most of the work had sold. It felt less like a polite preview than a happening: a gathering of people who, for once, believed art might matter again. After years of managed taste and curated caution, Power and Intimacy didn’t just look alive; it felt it.

In the end, this moment is less about political victories and more about cultural readiness. The artists at Power and Intimacy demonstrated the possibility — and the necessity — of renewal beyond political grandstanding, reclaiming art as a space where seriousness, beauty, and truth converge. For the new right, and for society at large, the challenge is to recognise that without a robust cultural foundation anchored in genuine artistic practice, political ambitions remain shallow. Art is not a luxury but the crucible where civilisation reflects, judges, and ultimately sustains itself. Greatness may not begin in the gallery, but it is impossible without what happens there.

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This article was written by Lana Starkey, a writer and artist based in Budapest. SLICE, her experimental film project about London, will launch soon.

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