Beautiful freaks
These cast-iron sculptures by the young artist Nicolas Deshayes are oddly beautiful. They cling to the gallery wall like the rococo ribbons and twirling flora that encrusted 18th-century ceilings. They ripple, like the Thames water they’re named after.
Made you look
They are also emphatically repulsive, suggestive of tree fungi, intestines, excrement and other things we don’t like to look at.
So hot right now
Touch their hard, metallic surfaces and you’ll get a surprise. They’re warm, like a living thing. They have orifices, through which heated river water is piped.
Shine on
Like the post-minimal artist Eva Hesse, Deshayes plays up the tension between our porous, friable bodies and the shiny industrial materials that fill our lives.
City limits
Cast iron is a major element in London’s bone structure, sprawling outwards from the river that runs through it: everything from lampposts to the manhole covers branded with Thames Water, beneath which the sewers flow.
