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When the artist Paul Anthony Smith sees an abandoned photo album on the street, he snaps it up like a lucky penny. On an afternoon in his studio in the Bronx, New York, he is surprised to learn that I didn’t do the same when I encountered one recently. “Oh no, you take it,” he says disapprovingly. “It’s so sad no one was able to adopt those images.” For Smith, these keepsakes represent an antidote to the scourge of iPhone photos; they are tactile and intimate yet anonymous.

The Jamaican-born artist is constantly filling his own albums with personal snapshots from his 35mm camera: a dinner party in London, Carnival festivities in Trinidad and Tobago, a beach day in St Thomas with his wife and children. Sometimes, he blows them up and uses them as the basis for large-scale compositions.

Smith’s distinctive style comes from the way he adds layers — spray-painted chain-link fences, tiny holes in the shape of breeze blocks, three-dimensional objects such as flags — to create distance between the source image (always his own) and the viewer. For many artists, the medium is the message. For Smith, the mediation is the message. In other words, the way he obscures his imagery is just as important as the imagery itself. “Sometimes, it’s like, ‘Ah, I’m revealing too much,’” he says. “I pick over some of my works . . . to disguise and protect the information that’s beneath.”

At Frieze London next week, Timothy Taylor Gallery will dedicate its entire booth to Smith’s work, marking the 36-year-old’s first solo presentation in the UK. Taylor describes Smith as “one of the most exciting young artists I’ve seen in a couple of years”.

Smith’s mention of disguising was referring to picotage, the novel technique for which he is best known. A portmanteau of “picking” and “collage” that originally referred to a French textile printing technique, the term also describes Smith’s laborious process of puncturing the surface of an ink-jet print with a sharpened potter’s needle over and over. (He studied ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute, which refined his attunement to surface texture.) “I don’t have assistants except for these 10 fingers,” he notes. The repetitive process is so strenuous that he often sleeps with his right hand in a brace. But it is also effective. The ritual can turn figures into ghostly apparitions or add a shimmering, lenticular overlay that reframes the entire composition.

At the fair, Smith will present several picotage works based on images he took of the ocean at sunrise while travelling across the Caribbean. The majority of the booth will be dedicated to thickly impastoed paintings of lush gardens, sometimes seen through a chain-link fence. Both bodies of work are informed by Smith’s identity as an immigrant — more specifically, the feeling of being simultaneously like an outsider looking in and an insider looking out.

Smith was born in Saint Ann’s Bay in 1988; his parents worked on cruise ships. After they split, his father moved to Florida and Smith followed aged nine. Often left in the care of his stepmother and three stepsiblings while his father travelled for work, Smith was an insider and outsider in his own home, as well as in his new country. His family was part of the Seventh Day Adventist church, following strict dietary rules and observing the sabbath. “I was always questioning religion and belief systems,” he says.

Smith’s picotage technique can turn figures into ghostly apparitions or add a shimmering, lenticular overlay that reframes the entire composition

Smith, who sports a bushy beard and a baseball hat, speaks like someone accustomed to translating his experiences for others. He loves a simile. Making an image on the wrong surface, he explains, is like wearing clothes that don’t fit; returning to a location and taking subpar pictures is like going to a restaurant and finding the food isn’t as good as you remembered. His art shares a similar impulse. “Everyone is trying to [be] like, ‘This is mine and this is yours,’” he says of his experience as an immigrant to the US. “I’m trying to visually pull people together.”

Smith’s Eye Fi Di Tropics series at Frieze is also inspired by twin sensations: watching a boat approach from the shore and watching a shore draw near from a boat. (The latter, Smith notes, is an experience shared by his seafaring parents and colonising figures such as Christopher Columbus.) In recent years, Smith has travelled throughout the Caribbean taking photos of the water, “trying to understand how [locals] saw people coming into their lands”.

These days, Smith is moving away from picotage and towards a looser, more improvisational mode of painting. The second body of work at Frieze, Dreams Deferred, is wild, tangled floral landscapes rendered in oil stick. Smith paints these lush scenes over photographs of gardens ranging from Versailles and Central Park to rangy, wildflower-dotted plots along highways.

The series, which takes its name from a Langston Hughes poem, began as a meditation on the fences and forces that keep people in and out of manicured spaces. (He got the idea from a fenced-in basketball court next to his former studio in Brooklyn.) For some of the works at Frieze, Smith abandoned the fence to focus solely on the flowers. “I love Arthur Jafa,” he says, referring to the American artist whose recent work plumbs the seedy underbelly of American culture, “but sometimes I don’t want to see those gory images, right?” 

Smith is also well aware that florals are friendlier for an art fair, where viewers have hundreds, if not thousands, of images competing for their attention. If he were to return to the UK for a gallery show, he says, he would explore more Caribbean imagery and potentially come back to picotage. But it is important to him that those works, which take more than 10 hours each to make, are viewed slowly, without distraction. “People always ask about the time it takes to make them,” he says with a sigh. I ask if that question annoys him. “It takes a lifetime,” he replies.

Frieze London runs October 9-13, timothytaylor.com

MORE than 9,000 British pubs are at risk of going bust within a year, a shocking new poll shows.

The survey found one in five boozers believes it is unlikely to survive the next 12 months unless the Chancellor reverses last year’s brutal tax hike on spirits. 

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Pub bosses argue the tax cut for draught beer has been a total flop, with only 4 per cent saying it provided any meaningful support.

They are now urging Rachel Reeves to scrap the 10.1 per cent duty hike on spirits at the Budget, which they claim has not only hit pubs and distillers hard but has also cost the Treasury £298 million in lost revenue.

The poll of more than 200 pubs by Survation for the UK Spirits Alliance (UKSA) also found 89 per cent of pub owners have seen boozers in their area close in the last six months.

Another 58 per cent fear a negative outlook for their own business in the next year and  53 per cent say spirits generate a higher profit margin than other drinks.

Megha Khanna, owner of the Gladstone Arms in London, warned: “By choosing to support only beer and cider makers while raising taxes on other products, the previous Government damaged our pubs and bars and targeted those consumers who choose to enjoy a cocktail, gin and tonic or spritz.  

“The Chancellor can back pubs, and the fantastic spirits makers that supply them, by reversing the disastrous decision by the last Government to hike duty by 10.1 per cent, which heaped pressure on pubs, slammed the breaks on the gin-boom, and ramped up inflation.”

Founder of Westminster-based Tamesis Dock Neema Rai added: “This is a sector we should be proud of and invest in. Reversing the last duty increase now at a time of economic hardship is a win-win situation for the Chancellor and businesses alike.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “Thriving pubs are often at the heart of our communities and play a vital role in supporting economic growth across the UK. That’s why it is important for us to act on the challenges that they face, including through our national growth mission.
 
“Business is at the heart of that mission, which is why we have pledged to cap corporation tax at 25 per cent, make the business rates system fairer, and publish a business tax roadmap so that future investments can be planned with confidence.”

Minor Attractions fair

In June 2023, London gallery owners Jacob Barnes and Jonny Tanna posed themselves a question: “Can two guys get up off the couch and run an art fair?” By October they had proved that the answer was “yes” with Minor Attractions, which launched as a satellite to Frieze. “We refer to last year’s edition as a proof of concept,” says Barnes, “but this year it’s a real art fair.” 

Taking place at The Mandrake, a five-star hotel in Fitzrovia, the week-long event will commandeer rooms as fair booths, “creating a new context for London’s buzzing art scene”. Local exhibitors include Mayfair institution Sadie Coles HQ but also new nomadic gallery Bolanle Contemporary; others are joining from further afield: Tbilisi to Toronto to Seoul. “We want to create a level playing field where exciting project spaces stand alongside major international galleries,” says Barnes. 

The native New Yorker opened art space Season 4 Episode 6 in Marylebone earlier this year, while Tanna runs north-west London gallery Harlesden High Street. Among their fair highlights are an LED light work by German multimedia artist Christian Jankowski, a life-size Plexiglas mannequin by Klara Zetterholm (both from Bucharest-based gallery Suprainfinit), and the deftly distorted paintings of Georgia Semple (with Deptford-based gallery Studio/Chapple). 

Accessibility is key. Tickets are required but are free of charge, while a programme of night-time happenings is being hosted by the likes of dance music collective Touching Bass (which Semple is part of) and performance platform Diasporas Now. “It’s out with the old and in with the new,” says Tanna, “that’s what we’re trying to do.” VW

October 8-13, minorattractions.com

Studio Voltaire, Casa Loewe

This year marks the 30th anniversary of not-for-profit arts and education organisation Studio Voltaire, and its director, Joe Scotland is on a mission. “Like many art organisations, the support we get from the Arts Council is very small — it equates to 4 per cent of our turnover,” he says. “But we’re being very proactive about it. We’ve established the Studio Voltaire Future Fund to support our work over the next five years; thus far we’ve raised half a million pounds.” 

Based in a former Victorian Methodist church in Clapham, south London, Studio Voltaire is centred on a programme of exhibitions and events that champion emerging and under-represented artists. Frieze Week presents an opportunity to celebrate its three-decade output — from career-launching shows to the “Rainbow Plaques” initiative, honouring queer communities across London — but also to add to the pot. 

To that end, Allied Editions is offering a lithograph print by British painter Rose Wylie — “Party Clothes (RW and Cat)”, 2024 — in the main fair, while at Casa Loewe on New Bond Street, the fashion label’s Foundation has collaborated with Studio Voltaire and artists including Alvaro Barrington, Anthea Hamilton and Sheila Hicks on a new series of limited editions.

“Loewe is a really important partner of ours,” says Scotland, highlighting the Loewe Foundation / Studio Voltaire Award that supports an international residency as well as free studio space for London-based artists. “They also have amazing in-house artisans.” This has enabled Barrington to create a “chain wrapped in leather, which can be used as jewellery or a charm”, while Hamilton has conceived a leather fan, de-embossed with the phrases “Che Bello/Che Brutta” (How Beautiful/How Ugly). VW

October 9-13, studiovoltaire.org

Lygia Clark, Whitechapel Gallery

Lygia Clark (1920-88) revolutionised art by making it interactive. Fed up with the rigidity of concrete art, the Brazilian trailblazer created works that were meant to be touched, manipulated and experienced by audiences. Her innovative “Bichos” (“critters”) were hinged geometric forms that viewers could fold and reshape. These feature in The I and the You, a major survey at Whitechapel Gallery that traces her output from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. During this period, Clark experimented with ways to transform art into a shared experience while navigating Brazil’s military dictatorship and, later, exile in Paris. The show includes paintings, works on paper and even performances restaging the artist’s participatory group works. KF

To January 12, whitechapelgallery.org

Marlene Dumas at Frith Street Gallery

Myth and grief swirl through Marlene Dumas’s new exhibition at Frith Street Gallery. Its title, Mourning Marsyas, references Ovid’s tale of a satyr who challenged Apollo to a music competition; his punishment for losing to the god was to be flayed alive. In a haunting painting of the same name, the South African painter transforms this gruesome story into what the gallery calls “a homage to those prepared to die for speaking truth to power”. Drawing from a range of visual and literary sources, other works, with their spectral figures and blurred faces, allude to distressing tragedies or capture dark moods. KF

To November 16, frithstreetgallery.com

Robert Longo at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac

In Searchers, a two-part exhibition, Robert Longo continues his career-long exploration of diverse visual media. At Thaddaeus Ropac, the American artist builds on his multimedia “Combines” with a seven-metre work, “Untitled (Pilgrim)”, composed of five panels each executed in different media: charcoal drawing, video, painting, sculpture and photography. Inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory and John Berger’s seminal book Ways of Seeing, the new work contrasts art-historical images with film stills, ads and news photographs of disasters to interrogate how meaning is created and disseminated. Concurrently, a companion piece, “Untitled (Hunter)”, will also be exhibited at Pace Gallery. KF

October 8-November 20 ropac.net; Oct 9-Nov 9, pacegallery.com

Letizia Battaglia, The Photographers’ Gallery

Letizia Battaglia put her life on the line with her work. Her career as a photojournalist began in the 1970s, and though she frequently captured daily life in her hometown of Palermo, she is remembered for her fearless documentation of the Mafia’s unrelenting grip on Sicily during the 1970s and 1980s. The Photographers’ Gallery will show a wide selection, from arresting images of small children brandishing guns to bodies beneath white sheets and a woman dancing at a New Year’s Eve party. NA

October 9-February 23, thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Yayoi Kusama, Victoria Miro

With decades of era-defining artwork behind her, it is difficult to imagine how Yayoi Kusama will continue to excite attendees at her latest exhibition. Yet with Everyday I Pray for Love at Victoria Miro, the 95-year-old artist does just that. Paintings feature her singular explorations of line and form and signature polka-dot patterning; treelike forms are made from stuffed and sewn fabrics; drawings of women’s profiles are given new life in bronze. But the big draw is Infinity Mirrored Room — Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart, where visitors will find their reflections refracted into infinity in a new light-filled installation. NA

To November 2, victoria-miro.com

Lauren Hasley at the Serpentine

Emajendat is the first UK exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey. Her South Central upbringing is an integral source of inspiration in her work, and her mixed-media installations and standalone objects often explore material culture. At the Serpentine, pink plastic tubes are turned into palm trees and luridly coloured signs are emblazoned with brand names in a maximalist vision. Visitors will find themselves wading through technicolour sand dunes and wandering past mirrored walls and floors plastered with discarded CDs. NA

October 11-March 2, serpentinegalleries.org

MILLIONS of households have just hours left to submit their meter readings amid the fresh energy price cap.

After tomorrow (October 8), Octopus Energy customers will no longer be able to backdate their October 1 meter readings, meaning they could risk unexpected charges to their bill.

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Energy suppliers often recommend customers submit their meter readings on National Meter Reading Day, October 1, so they can secure an accurate bill when the price cap changes.

However, some suppliers have allowed customers extra time to submit the reading from October 1 in case they missed the date.

Households on a Standard Variable Tariff (SVT) are affected by the price cap and should submit a meter reading.

Households without an accurate bill could risk being overcharged – or if they are undercharged, they could eventually owe money – so either way it pays to get it right.

The new energy price cap, which limits the amount that can be charged, is now around 10% higher than the previous level which had been in place since July.

According to Ofgem, which sets the limit, this means the average dual fuel bill rises from £1,568 on average to £1,717, though the exact amount you pay still depends on usage and can be higher or lower.

The energy price cap changes every there months – for instance, in June, the cap fell to the lowest level in two years, from £1,690 to the previous rate of £1,568.

Now, a household in England, Wales and Scotland using a standard amount of gas and electricity will see their annual bill rise by about £149.

The price cap makes sure that prices for people on SVTs are fair and reflect the cost of energy.

It is calculated using a range of factors, including wholesale energy prices, as well as network, operating and policy costs, and VAT.

In order to maintain an accurate bill amid the price cap change, customers should have remembered to take a meter reading from the first day of October.

Octopus Energy customers must submit this reading via the phone, website, or mobile app by the end of tomorrow..

Keep in mind that if you are planning to submit your reading via the phone, Octopus phone lines close at 5pm.

If you don’t submit your reading by this date you can still tel the supplier later on, but it may not be applied to your next bill.

Can I backdate my meter reading if I’m with another supplier?

Octopus customers aren’t the only ones with hours to submit – E.on Next is another supplier which has set its deadline as tomorrow.

E.on Next advises that the best way to submit a reading is via your online account – the website also informs customers on how to take an accurate meter reading.

EDF, OVO and British Gas customers have a bit more time, with EDF’s deadline being October 9, OVO’s being October 11, and British Gas allowing another week, until October 14.

EDF customers can submit meter reads through the EDF app, their online MyAccount, or via telephone, email, text or Whatsapp.

Ovo Energy customers can submit their meter readings via the app, online account, phone, Whatsapp or webchat at any time, however the closer to the bill date the customer provides their bill date, the less of the bill will need to be estimated.

For accurate bills, Ovo recommends customers opt for a smart meter.

Meanwhile, back in September British Gas said: “If customers take a read on 1st October, but don’t get a chance to provide it on the day, a form on our website, including on our meter read page, will be available until 14th October.

“This will allow them to submit the read they took on 1st October and we will use that reading to calculate what they pay before the rates change.”

For customers of Scottish Power or Utility Household, the deadline to submit a meter reading has unfortunately closed.

What if I have a smart meter?

If you are on a smart meter, you do not need to submit a reading, as this is automatically sent by your device.

Those on prepayment plans or fixed rates also do not need to worry, as their bill is either predetermined, or their rate is locked in for the duration of their deal.

Only households on an SVT are required to submit a meter reading, so they can avoid any disputes with their energy dealer when their bill comes through.

If you’re unsure what plan you are on, visit your suppliers website or revisit your paperwork from when you began your energy package.

If you’re concerned about the new price cap

If you’re worried about affording hiked up bills this winter, many energy suppliers are opening Support Funds to help struggling customers.

For example, British Gas has reopened its Individual and Families support fund, which in the past has helped over 21,000 British customers with energy debt write off grants of up to £2,000.00.

Over £140 million has been set aside this winter season for those who are struggling financially.

This extends to British Gas customers and non-customers, who live in England, Scotland or Wales.

To find out if you are eligible, visit the British Gas website and search for the Individual and Families support fund – here you will find all the details available.

It is recommended that customers from companies with hardship funds first seek assistance from their own schemes.

For example, Octopus Energy has recently launched a scheme for pensioners after their Winter Fuel Payments were slashed, offering fresh discretionary credit of between £50 and £200.

Scottish Power’s Hardship Fund has also handed out more than £60 million to struggling customers.

And Utilita also offers grants to its customers to help clear of minimise debt, by operating through its charity partner, Utilita Giving.

Utilita Giving also partners with other charities such as IncomeMax, which helps customers make sure they are claiming what they are entitled to, and Let’s Talk, which provides replacement white goods.

E.ON’s Next Energy Fund also provides grants and appliance replacement services to struggling customers.

To find out what support your energy supplier is offering this colder season, visit their website or ring their helpline (which can be found online).

Help can also be accessed from the government via the Household Support Fund, which has renewed a fresh pot of £421 million funding for vulnerable households.

To find out if this is available with your supplier or council, and whether you are eligible, go to their websites and read the terms and conditions of the scheme.

If you’re just looking for simple ways to reduce your bill this winter, each of these supplier schemes, as well as the Household Support Fund also offer free electric blankets as part of their deal.

For example, Octopus have said they will distribute 20,000 electric blankets from Dreamland to its most vulnerable customers, keeping them warm for “as little as 3p an hour”.

The “heat yourself not your home” approach is trending fast, with retailers such as B&M introducing ranges of affordable self-heating appliances.

However, it is important to note that the elderly should not avoid turning the heating on if they are cold – for energy help contact your provider or local council, or read our article here.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

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