Pablo Bronstein.

PABLO BRONSTEIN 

Paternoster Square, Herald St., London

Pablo Bronstein's most recent solo exhibition, Paternoster Square, continues the artist's dialogue with the formal vocabularies of dance and architecture. Bronstein's books, drawings, paintings, performances and video installations create a space for the two disciplines to co-exist, fuse, rupture and act as a critical language for each other.

The work in this exhibition furthers Bronstein's study of urban structures in London that date from the late 70s to the early 90s. As a background to this body of work, Bronstein presented a commissioned performance at the 2006 Frieze Art Fair where he took globetrotting art powerbrokers on a sightseeing bus tour of London. Acting as the group's tour guide, Bronstein provided commentary on the history and present state of some of the city's most notoriously hideous examples of postmodern architecture, highlighting the brash, garish and seemingly random use of flashy colours, the neo-classical detailing and the cheapness of their construction. The majority of this performance's script is used as the text in his new book, Postmodern Architecture in London, in which snarky critiques of more than two dozen of London's postmodern structures are accompanied by whimsical sketches of these sites as ruins.

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Paternoster Square is the public space (as public as one can get in late capitalism) that is found adjacent to St. Paul's Cathedral. This square has undergone a long and uncomfortable process of regeneration dating back to the mid-80s, with everyone from The Prince of Wales and former mayors of the city weighing in on its development. Supporters of the scheme praised the site for its harmonious architecture, much of it built in brick and stone, and its mix of offices and shops. The square's design was equally heralded for its coherent organization of space through the use of a large central piazza and walkways, which cut through the block in sensible ways to tie it into the surrounding urban fabric. They claimed that it represented an ideal example of modern development on a traditional site. But with no incorporated housing, it remains vacant outside of times with high tourist traffic, and is eerily dismal after work hours. The square is an articulation of a completely market-driven urban renewal in which we are only able to perform an ornamental urban citizenship of dining and shopping.

As you enter Bronstein's exhibition, you are greeted with a large, ornately framed drawing of the erection of the square's new central Corinthian column, topped with a flaming bronze urn rendered in gold leaf. You see an immaculately rendered depiction of the scene as if it happened a few centuries ago. Wooden scaffolding is surrounded by tiny figures mounting the column with ropes and pulleys.

In the centre of the main gallery space stands a structure built from raw timber that houses four video projectors. From this, commercial-quality images are projected onto four freestanding screens arranged in a square configuration. The screens, constructed from raw timber and MDF, are decorated to resemble blank stage flats in a neo-classical cityscape--the silhouettes of a dome, a false front, a pediment and a cornice all set the scene for the action playing out in the videos. With each video channel acting as a different perspective, we observe a minimal studio setting dressed with three large sculptures of stylized neoclassical details. An urn, a column and an archway all painted a glossy brown evoke the hue of smeared shit. A group of dancers, sporting sickening teal green bodysuits, compose and hold formations sourced from classical ballet and court dance, with direction being given off-camera by Bronstein.

Your gaze is pulled from screen to screen, taking in the live rehearsal from several perspectives at once. The appreciation for the sprezzatura inherent in classical dance is soon displaced, as you notice the unforgiving spandex bodysuits, which meld with the dancers' curves, nooks and crannies.

At the back of the gallery hangs a darkly romantic canvas of Paternoster Square rendered in the style of the paintings commissioned by Prince Charles in the 80s, which presented his vision of the square's regeneration. The painting is surrounded by a flamboyant golden frame and covered in a thick gloss, making it almost invisible under the harsh halogen lighting. London's skyline in the background is an unnerving, hellish red. Is this the scene of the square's original destruction during the bombings of World War II? Or is it a foretelling of the creepy result of the regeneration, echoing the misplaced and outdated neo-classical ideals of the British upper class?

Bronstein may approach his subjects with genuine curiosity and love, but his renderings of them are less generous. This pungently critical work is made up of a layering of styles, times, places and media. It uses an overtly pastiched approach to reference postmodernism generally, and specifically the architecture associated with it. Bronstein's work is a thoughtful and articulate consideration of the state of our city spaces. The globe's population is now more than 50 percent urban; what kind of world do we want to build for ourselves from here on out, and who gets to decide what it will look like? I find this work especially urgent in the UK, as 'public-realm art' has entered into fashion again thanks to the impending 2012 Olympics and numerous regeneration plans. Is this what we need again? Maybe in the end, we should just focus our creative thoughts into considerate urban planning and decent architecture.