Concrete Playground

Cartoonish representations of figures from philosophy, metamorphoses through hand-puppetry, and heads that are floating away — the viewer is firmly in the territory of the psychedelic here. This is probably not much of a surprise given that Matthew Hopkins' day job is being in Naked on the Vague, and the collagey, layered soundtracking to two of the rooms reflect another of his projects, being half of Hochman & Hopkins. Apparently he likes to keep busy.

"Pewtery-bronzey-black finished grotesque candelabra/pencil sharpener maquettes," read my notes on the first room of the show, a set of combined-portrait sculptures that Hopkins has entitled People Coming Together Through a Shared Object. These works are pairs of figures, facing one another and conjoined by a pencil, arranged on plinths like a museum reconstruction of an historical symposium, backed by a pastiche recording of theories and texts from philosophy, conspiracies and the occult to form an indecipherable synchronic conversation.

The next room houses Hypnagogic Reconstruction #1 — Heads, a sound/video work in which a series of faces appear and change in a projection onto the gallery wall. "Brush-and-ink hooded Kabuki eyes," I've noted down, "and a flaccid windsock nose, plus hand-puppets and electro-ambient weirdness," and I stand by that description. Back out from behind the black velvet curtain cordoning off that room there are Tops and Bottoms, a sequence of high-detail fine-line drawings of heads and feet in various stages of distortion, and there are the Ascending Heads. These have a sort of cruel cartoon Cubism rearranging their anatomy, with squiggles and dark outlines from somewhere between Keith Haring and Reg Mombasa. These heads have been bloodlessly severed, and seem to be escaping their bodies into the abstract blueness of their backgrounds.