Monory’s direct reference to contemporary popular culture in his painting has had some critics align his 1960s work with Pop art of the period. But Monory produces a more pensive and sombre portrait of the modern world than that of his American contemporaries. Juxtaposing images from advertisements, magazines and newspapers, Monory creates cinematic, dreamlike paintings. Each is bathed in his distinctive Monorychrome filter of yellow, magenta or his signature Monorian blue.

Monory’s unexplained and incomplete narratives suggest that the artist has no intention of uniting his viewers in a shared understanding of the paintings’ content. He creates a narrative climate, but then he stops, and it’s up to us to create our own reality from his ambiguous paintings. No singular truth or meaning to be found? Oh hey Lyotard, the postmodernist theorist who defined contemporary culture by ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Lyotard saw something in the paintings of Monory that chimed with his own thinking and sent a letter across the French capital to tell him so. The film’s production follows the exchange of a series of letters between the two.

 Lyotard may now have had to make new celebrity friends in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery but Monory is still practicing artist. Space will be showing some of his film work and photography alongside the filmed conversation. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

 On until June 2nd.  For more info, visit: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/jean-fran-ois-lyotard-and-jacques-monory-screens

The post Something You Should See… Screens at Space Studios appeared first on The Cultural Exposé.

In the world of entertainment, light-hearted generally trumps serious-minded every time. But sometimes you want a night out that makes you think hard, something that opens up your mind to new ways of seeing and new challenges. Of course, you can normally get all the cod-philosophy you like down the local pub, but it’s generally pot luck as to what intellectual gems you’ll emerge with and there’s always the danger that what started as an amicable airing of opposing opinions will descend into a beer-goggled mire of incoherent squabbling and point-scoring. No one’s the winner here.

Well if you’re looking for a night of intellectual enlightenment and horizon-expansion (minus the air of cocky pretentiousness that sometimes accompanies these things) then what you want is 5×15. It’s like a physical version of Radio 4’s In Our Time, except without the unifying theme; five speakers, usually from wildly differing arenas, talk for fifteen minutes on whatever subject they choose, and the only rule being there’s no scripts. Set in the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, the best thing is the calibre of the speakers and the diverse range of subjects – past guests have included writer Will Self, campaigner Camila Batmanghelidjh and pyschologist Simon Baron Cohen (yep, brother of Sacha) with talks on subjects such as evil, the importance free of speech and the future of theatre. On April’s billing will be Nigerian writer Ben Okri (pictured) and neuroscientist and journalist Jonah Lehrer in a session that’s sure to be as passionate and informative as their respective works. (Words: Jane Duru) 

5×15 takes place on April 16th and April 30th. For more info visit  www.5x15stories.com

The post Somewhere you should go… 5×15 appeared first on The Cultural Exposé.