Great Buffoon - LONDON KICKS - Fashion, Music, Art, Film, London and Going Out

It must be possible to extrapolate via some piece of economic mechanics the health and buoyancy of a city's art market by the amount of project spaces exhibiting at any one time. I once heard someone particularly dull say that project spaces only describe themselves as such until they turn a profit; this seems both unimaginatively cynical and outdated, partly because some major commercial players describe themselves as project spaces (White Cube Hoxton for instance, or Deitch Projects in New York), and partly because the rampant commercialism of art has consumed whole the taboo once seen by the young and idealistic of opening a purely profit driven enterprise. If you heard someone you'd graduated with was opening a commercial gallery, it'd be hard to find the idealist still affecting greater disgust at the sell out than amazement at the ambition of your contemporary. As a result though, we must encourage the project space with even more enthusiasm, because it reminds us that work is exhibited as part of a dialogue, not just to be sold, and that a healthy art market should support this.

De Leadùs is just off the Clerkenwell Road, and comprises a charming café, which on the opening night was serving cheap beer, cocktails and strawberries and cream. On the top floor there are studios, and the middle is used for exhibiting work. The inaugural show was a wittily curated study of buffoonery in its many manifestations, which felt appropriate given the tone of the recent mayoral elections, which indeed one of the works on display seemed to be making direct reference to. It included the work of Adham Faramawy, Nicolas Deshayes, Mark McGowan, Karl-Oska Olsson, Eddie Peake and Lynton Talbot.

Great Buffoon, 20th June – 19th July

De Leadùs, 4 Sutton Lane EC1

Charles DD Smith