Jonathan McAloon

French graffiti artist JR first came to prominence when one of his pieces of ‘pervasive art’ – large photo-prints he hangs or pastes around the streets – appeared in the background of footage from the 2005 Paris riots. He has since become a hot artist to legally commission, and for the 2016 Olympic Games he made enormous prints of athletes jumping over Rio’s buildings, swimming in its ocean, and diving off its mountains like Greek titans.  His current exhibition at Lazinc gives you some sense of the scale of that project, but in a regular-sized Mayfair gallery space. The viewer has to walk underneath the massive paper head and shoulders of Sudanese high jumper Mohamed Younes Idriss, fixed to scaffolding, just to get in. But ‘Giants – Body of Work’ is billed as a ‘behind the scenes’ exhibition, and it mainly describes JR’s process on a smaller scale. The architectural plans and installation permits are collaged into 3D-printed digital reliefs of the final images: an innovative, figuratively layered approach to distilling the original project. Straight photographs of the monuments in situ look good, but hardly recapture their impact.    The problem with massive installation art is that it’s hard to shrink down into a conventional gallery without diluting it. Fabulous images can be weak if they’re only a reproduction of the original at a remove. So the most successful attempts to transmute JR’s work here go for a different kind of awe entirely. Black-and-white ink-on-wood depict

Before the steamship, ocean travel generally involved sailing for weeks in abysmal conditions, desperate to get off and stop being sick. But half way through the nineteenth century all that changed, and people couldn't wait to get on. This opulent exhibition at the V&A shows how for almost 100 years, the sea was where nations displayed their wealth, and where the upper crust set the latest fashions. A maritime exhibition might not scream ‘interesting’ to everyone, but this one really is laden with visual gifts. Showing how interior design evolved on board, and how this in turn influenced international dry-land style, this is peak V&A: stylised and stylish, swanky and kitsch. There’s a nice synergy between cabin atmosphere and shiny-things-under-soft-light museum vibe. There are gorgeous art nouveau posters and art deco chairs; embossed silver-leaf wall coverings are hung like bits of ancient tapestry; a tiara worn on the RMS Lusitania – sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, killing more than 1,000 passengers – sparkles with tragic glamour. There’s a moral undertone too. As well as clips of Kate and Leo in ‘Titanic’ (salvaged parts of the original ship are also on show ), there is footage of people arriving in the 1950s from the West Indies. This industry was built on migrants: without people moving from one country to another, the grandeur wouldn’t have existed. It’s an exhibition for our time. Though it could do without the sound of horns, surf and rigging piped in. That seems a

Vanessa Bell spent her life surrounded by famous people, and has come to be remembered primarily as Virginia Woolf’s sister. But she was one of the most interesting characters of her day and – from the look of this exhibition – one of its finest artists too. This is her first major retrospective, which just goes to show.  She lived and worked within the sexually fluid Bloomsbury Set, painting a group of brilliant posh people who all collaborated and shagged each other. She was excellent at capturing people in creative contemplation: writing, reading, thinking – even (shock horror) knitting. The best pieces here present a clash of tweedy refinement and brash sensuality. Her gaze is sympathetic, accepting, tolerant of whatever the sitter presents her: how very Bloomsbury.  Artistically, too, Bell tried everything. There are forays into abstraction and Braque-style cubism; her naked male forms have a Degas flavour. Even when these forays are derivative they’re still very good. But she is at her best when doing straightforward Post-Impressionist portraits of her muckers, from John Lennon-esque Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, who actually invented the term Post-Impressionism.  Also included in the ticket price is some modern icing for your cake. Musician and poet Patti Smith began visiting Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat Charleston, in Sussex, in 2003, and created a project based on turn-of-the-century photography, including Bell’s. You can see it displayed alongside Bell’s own work

Imagine spending whole decades perfecting one type of painting. In one medium. In one colour. If you can’t, you’re just not Zen enough – and you’ve spent far too little time around South Korean art of the past 50 years.  Park Seo-Bo is regarded as the founder of dansaekhwa, or tansaekhwa, a hugely influential school of post-war Korean minimalism that looks like abstract expressionism. Complex? Nah, pal, it shirks extraneous ‘meaning’: creating these canvases is supposed to require the artist to enter a state of blankness, and repeat the same technique over and over.  You know the feeling straight away. Entering White Cube, you are confronted with literal blank canvases (dansaekhwa translates as monochrome). But each work from Park’s Ecriture paintings of 1983-93 is full of detail. Some are huge, murky and precise – sort of OCD Rothkos. Some are encrusted with a paper called hanji that is soaked with paint then scraped and pulled around the surface. The effect can be like marks on drying concrete. Dark patches of once-wet white hanji paper have a water-damage feel, echoing time passing. Just think: half a century has gone into perfecting this work.  Luckily for us busy, modern, metropolitan types with our steam-room yoga sessions, we’re already accidentally acquainted with dansaekhwa principles. They’re basically the same as mindfulness: concentrating on being in the moment, letting the things that make us stressed as owt fall away. I bet you’ve sat through that talk in your c