Space52 exhibits Cycloptics. Monocular Gestures: Brian Catling and the Cycloptic Continuum

a review by Katerina Milesi

“If you don’t have a division, a separation, you can’t question. One half of the brain doesn’t ask questions of the other half, they just agree.”
–Brian Catling

This thought can only be encompassed by Brian Catling’s Cyclops– his face, bisected by a mirror, was distorted into a single eye and a speaking orifice. Brian’s lifelong fascination with the Cyclops transcended the mere symbol or the image of the figure and evolved into a meditation on vision, humanity, and artistic creation.
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Brian Catling (b. 1948) RA was not only an artist, but a shaman and magician of sorts – conjuring worlds, playing with the seen and unseen, poking fun, embracing the spectral. He was born in London in 1948 and his multi-media practice encompassed sculpture, painting, performance, video making, poetry and fiction.

Through his performance Cyclops (1996), he transformed his own bisected visage into an oracular, taunting presence, a lone eye and voice that interrogated both itself and its audience. The Cyclops became Brian’s alter-ego; a metaphor for the artist as witness and provocateur, challenging the passive consumption of art and demanding an active reckoning with its conditions of creation.

Today, an artist-run collaborative initiative, known as Cycloptics, curated by Jack Catling and Christina Mamakos, brings together various artists worldwide who have been touched in some way by the work, guidance, inspiration and activities of Brian.
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Cycloptics visited Greece for the first time this November in space52, an artist-run space run by Dionisis Christofilogiannis in the heart of Athens, in the country-birthplace of the Cyclopean myth. From Homer’s Odyssey, where Polyphemus is both terror and tragedy, to ancient art and architecture, the Cyclops is a creature of mythology, a one-eyed giant both gentle and fierce. It has symbolized both creative genius and primal chaos. But monocularity in the ancient world does not necessarily point to limited vision. Indeed, the Graeae oracles famously shared one eye, seeing into the future through a shared organ, offering sight that was tenuously visual but certainly visionary. If we exist in a binary where knowledge and sight sit in chorus and conflict, how can we disrupt this to explore the nature of what it means to see, and with this create new ways of knowing?

Catling’s work, like these myths, engages with the duality of the cyclops: as a being of immense power yet deeply isolated, its singular eye a window into the limitations and potential of human perception. Through this persistent metaphor of vision and isolation, Cycloptics reinvigorated the Cyclopean myth within the contemporary landscape of art and thought.

​Jack Catling, co-curator and son of Brian Calting, explained, “Within the context of this show, my father represents an influence, or as he would put it ‘(an) imagination creeping slyly through the vein’; a series of moments/encounters that have influenced myriad artistic practices, both directly and indirectly. Greece was the only place this exhibition could have been initially born, as the root of the cyclops, a place my father loved, and a place where new stories continually emerge from the layers of history.”


Christina Mamakos: “Ι co-curated the show with Jack, and for many of the artists gathered and invited, Brian Catling was a friend, a mentor, a teacher, an inspiration, a disruptor.  He both created foundations, and de-stablized at the same time, forcing you to question what you know and why, and how deeply you could engage, feel, and in turn create.”

At the opening of the exhibition, Nathaniel Mellors’ Untitled Musical Performance together with Conrad Shawcross’ Shadow Quintet transfromed space52 into a space with music of the eye and the heart with analogue visuals where the kaleidoscope blended light and sound into endless variations.

Mick Peters’ small yet audacious Galerie Fataliste gallery booth sign hangs right as you enter the space carrying the bite satire. As a silent participant it welcomes you and asks: what’s in a name when the stage itself is so tenuous? 

Hanging on the opposite wall is Ian Kiaer’s Brian’s Thumb, a vast black expanse, a stage and a void, in whose corner lies a single photograph of John Ruskin sucking his thumb, small yet weighty, a relic of vision that was anchored in Brian Catling’s office space. The thumb, it is purported, may be Catling’s.

Next to it, Tom Woolner’s painting made out of acrylic resin, fed through the needle of a syringe, is a testament of sentimentality made solid.

Christina Mamakos’ hands disrupt the linearity of an old book and invite the audience’s hands to touch and skim through what was once a vessel of fixed tales and rigid truths, and has now been turned into a playground of artistic mischief, a reordering of the past. When we disrupt the canon, do we destroy or remake it? Her paintings installed across the space, echo that disruption.

Chiarra Williams’ curtain-column with a circular image of the omphalos lying at its feet constitutes a tender symbol of origin and center. The grand column is grounded in the quiet vulnerability of the human body. The cosmic collides with the deeply personal.

Kate Davis’ Step out of the Cave, a battery operated rotating metal disc is a kinetic text work that dissolves the words “head-heart-hole” into a vortex and creates a centre, a swirling passage into a cave. The shadows it casts are the flickers of ideas, alive and restless, reminding us that art often begins where language dissolves.

I must also highlight Filippos Tsitsopoulos, the “mask voyager,” and his 2016 photograph Let’s Go!—a relic of his performance aboard the Royal Iris, the abandoned ferry on the Thames where the Beatles once played on Fridays and Elvis Costello on Saturdays. On the night of the Private View of Cycloptics, Tsitsopoulos drew a thread between these waters and his homeland, placing raw fish—perhaps travelers of this very river—atop his head. Like an eccentric conductor, he transformed space52’s backyard into an space of chaos and delight, sprayhosing the audience into fits of yells and laughter. Then, as the water settled and silence embraced the crowd, he recited Brian’s poetry, feeding a myth that is neither past nor present but tethered to the now, alive in its recitation.


These highlighted works represent just a fraction of the artistic dialogue brought to life in Cycloptics. The exhibition amplifies an impressive array of voices like those also by Mamoru Abe, Reginald Aloysius, Roddy Bell, Peter Blegvad, Aliki Braine, Jack Catling, Maria Chevska, Andy Cooke, Geoff Cox, David Moore, Steve Dilworth, Larry Lynch, Stephen Farthing, Dan Fox, Hattie Landells, Matthew Luck Galpin, Oona Grimes, Simon Raven, Victor Rees, Iain Sinclair, Holly Slingsby, Aaron Williamson & Ocean Farini.  

A durational programme of performances unfolded the night of the Private View, including titled pieces Collapsing Deities (Holly Slingsby), Cycloptic Impressions (Simon Raven), and Ophaloskepsis (Chiara Williams); all gestures of the monocular vision.

Cycloptics in its totality comprises of forms that invite and resist, spaces that hold truths and silences, and objects that linger between the tangible and the ephemeral. In the heart of Athens, the birthplace of the Cyclopean myth, this exhibition defines the Cyclops in enticing fragments.

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This review Monocular Gestures, written by Katerina Milesi takes part of the ARTICULATE PROMOTE Programme.