Seeing as we’re here, I think I’ll go for the English breakfast. Or maybe the keftedes – or even the grilled “shieftalia”. Hmm. How about “Mini hot-dog and french fires”? Or jacket potato with “bolognaise sause and cheeese”? Decisions, decisions. Hang on a minute. The menu – in red and blue on a white background – is a perfect full-scale copy, including the original mis-spellings, of the tourist menu on display at the Ideal Café in Paphos, Cyprus, repainted by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou. Presented outside one of the galleries at Goldsmiths CCA, as part of Matt Connors’ exhibition Finding Aid, the menu wrong-foots the hungry viewer. The American painter includes 21 other artists in his largest exhibition in the UK to date. As much as he is giving us context, the artist sets out to enlist and co-opt, to enlarge, confuse and divert.
Artists frequently make fascinating curators, bringing their sensibilities to bear on their choices and affinities. Do not expect art historical rectitude or the obvious to guide their thinking. Connors’ choices are eclectic, heterogenous and unexpected, just like his own art, with its cheery stripes and arcs, his squiggles and tadpoles of thinly painted colour, his amateur-hour Rothko riffs, his modernist mash-ups of the geometric and the informal. Connors’ paintings can sometimes look like the sort of jaunty inoffensive abstracts you see decorating hospital walls, or painted by-the-yard hotel-room decor. He is unafraid of the decorative and the apparently slight.
