A Bug's Life

That is the title of the current exhibition at the Kettle's Yard gallery (on until 14 March). It could have been anything, but what it was is a room of drawings, lots of black and white, etchings, ink on paper, scribbly and crowded. If there were figures it was hard to disentangle them; abstract compositions had lots of movement but nothing I could hook on to; if there were words, they were deliberately illegible (there was a quite nice blackboard piece, blackboard paint on paper (not board) plus chalk that had been written and erased and overwritten and erased in layers). Beauty and ornament are irrelevant here, in a modern world which is so busy and full but of things you can't identify with. If there's meaning, I couldn't see it, though sometimes it felt like a foreign place with a hint of intelligibility if only they would slow down, or someone would translate. I found it quite stressful, and as I'd gone looking for colour it was oppressive to see so much black and white, with maybe the occasional touch of dull red-brick brown.

Round the corner we move on to some Constructivists, much more my sort of thing, clean lines and a combination of form and balance that just hits a sweet spot - and sometimes an oddness of perspective knocks you off again. Kasimir Malevich's drawings carry a sense of motion, and I found his simple animations (of squares and circles getting larger and smaller - or is it closer and further away? - and sliding, intersecting or overlapping (no, they can't be overlapping, it's purely two-dimensional) blocks and rods) beautifully absorbing. Again, it doesn't represent something real, and they're not readily parseable in a human way (a little soulless?), but it feels a more optimistic view of modernity.