London is crumbling, but not for long. In Matthias Groebel’s printed ‘paintings’ – made in Whitechapel in the mid-2000s – the city is bleak, derelict, graffiti’d. But it’s slowly being torn down and rebuilt, too; its greying brickwork tidied, sanitised, gentrified in a process of ceaseless, careless renewal.
Each image comes in double, a stereoscopic vision of mundane street scenes, captured on a camcorder and then printed disjointedly on canvas with a custom painting machine. They’re part-photo, part-painting, caught – like the people in the images – between the broken present and a violent future. A girl in a hijab dances against a backdrop of shuttered windows and tagged walls. The building in the background is Tower House, a vast turn-of-the-century tenement, its windows smashed, its masonry crumbling. Men in skullcaps walk by it as scaffolding envelopes the building, hoardings go up promising loft apartments to rent. The structure, and the city, is being chewed up and reconstituted.
But Groebel’s work doesn’t feel like someone railing against the injustice of gentrification. The paintings are too spectral, pixelated and uncomfortable to say anything quite so binary. Instead, it feels like an almost anthropological observation of humanity. It images the poor people of this poor neighbourhood – symbols of us, the wider population of London – as ticks on the back of this city; ticks about to be treated by the corrosive power of rampant capitalism. It’s psychogeographic, detached and terrifying.
Not all of it is great. The film is a tough, slightly tedious watch, and the inclusion of a communist text at the start of the show is brutally heavy handed. But the paintings are awesome, nostalgic and weird and fractured, all ghostly and miasmatic, a window into this city’s past that will leave you awkwardly, foggily nostalgic for London before the ball pits and £8 pints.