The Buday is a new contemporary art gallery which is showing a new installation by London Group member Vaughan Grylls.
When You Read This
The Buday
Thursday 14th March – Sunday 14th April
11-4pm except mondays
266 Hackney Road London E2 7SJ
The Buday is named in memory of Zbyszek Buday (1944-2018), a Polish-British painter who
used this former workshop as a studio. Works by Buday can be seen in the ante-room to
the gallery.
The opening exhibition consists of a full-size bedroom floor suspended in the gallery.
The underside is covered in the artist’s handwritten translation from the 1880s’ original
handwriting in French. The discovery was made during recent renovation work on a floor in the Château de Picomtal in the French Alpine village of Crottes. The author of the text was none other than the floor’s carpenter who signed himself as Martin Joachim. He dated his writings between 1880 and 1881. In a fascinating series of picaresque short tales, Martin reveals what was going on beneath the surface of his village, truths he now renders literally. His main topic is the hypocrisy and corruption of power seen through those employed in important positions by the Church and the State. Their greed for money and exploitative sex appears insatiable. Martin also writes about the villagers’ afictions with incurable diseases and his community’s utter dependency on successful harvests.
In a journal peopled with Chaucerian characters, Martin records the beginnings of
the modern world – the demolition of medieval walls, the arrival of the railway and the
creeping curtailment of the power of the Church by the French State. He applauds these
developments.
When You Read This takes its title from the opening lines of what is essentially Martin’s
confessional for the whole village. He obviously relishes the prospect of his targets
treading on their secrets without realising it.
Ultimately Martin comforts himself with the fact that long after he and those he writes
about are dead, the truth will be discovered.
When You Read This(2019) employs a style used by Vaughan Grylls in Grandmother(2011),
Herman’s Sermons (2016) and American Mail (2017) in which size is combined with detail.
Grylls calls these works his ‘panoramas of the personal’.
Ferdy Carabott, Buday Gallery
