Chapter II, Part I

This being notice of my second visit to the Burtynsky extraction/abstraction exhibition at the Saatchi gallery at the start of the Kings Road, once the haunt of the young and beautiful. The first visit being noticed at reference 1.

Train to Clapham Junction and from there a No.319 bus to Sloane Square, passing the Asparagus public house on the way. One of the houses put up for sale by Wetherspoon's, I think last year, and now being run by the Portobello Pubco of reference 2. It did not appear to have changed from the outside so clearly a visit to the interior is called for to see what, if anything, they have done to it. Will they make a go of something that the maestro walked away from, with all his flair, with all the muscle that comes with a large operation? Will small turn out to be beautiful?

To the Colbert of reference 3 for another bacon roll, not quite as good as the week before but still good. Perhaps there is a craving for the real thing from Whitecross Street, rather than one of these fancy imitations? But BH was quite happy with her decaff and Pain au Chocolat.

To Saatchi via the fancy shopping & eating area next door, snapped above. BH in blue to the left, taking a serious interest in something or other. We took the opportunity to book ourselves in for lunch, a little later than we had wanted, but as it turned out the time in the gallery melted away. The later time was the right time.

I had forgotten in a week how big the pillars are at the front entrance.

Sometimes, while still being impressed by the resolution, up close it was easy to forget that one is looking at a landscape from above. Road to the right aside, one could easily mistake this one for some kind of arty textile.

I also worried that in the larger photographs - or perhaps assembly would be a better word - there was probably not a single point of view, there was probably a short sequence of photographs taken from points which might easily be hundreds of metres apart. And to that extent, what one was seeing was not something that one could see for oneself, in one eyeful. At the time I thought that this was an important point, but I am not so sure now.

A lot of the colours were very strange.

But at least this time I did find a fish in the wall of coral, albeit only one. Albeit only a common or garden goldfish.

This one for a correspondent who wound up in Australia with a geologist who started out there spending quality time in Kalgoorlie.

No idea whether he was into gold. Presumably the property of the people at reference 4. Not the sort of thing that one can imagine flying in this country.

Despite it being my second time around, I still nearly missed out on a couple of rooms at the end, devoted to various aspects of waste disposal at scale. Or perhaps 'at pace' which seems to be a bit of management jargon presently infesting the airwaves.

Glad to have been for a second helping, the sense of lifelessness noted on the previous visit notwithstanding.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/saatchi-one.html.

Reference 2: https://portobellopubco.com/.

Reference 3: https://colbertrestaurant.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.superpit.com.au/.