What lies beneath

摘要

I don't know why but it seems to me that Peter St John, heading up our press tour around Caruso St John's newly completed Newport St Gallery in London's Vauxhall, is feeling a bit sheepish. And that's not merely a pun on the fact that he's been working in the shadow of his client Damien Hirst for the last ten years - a man who became one of the richest artists in the world by slicing up, embalming and exhibiting dead farm animals as art. No, I get the feeling that as he's taking us round the £25m, 3440m~2 gallery, he is for some reason having to convince himself as much as us about the design. It would be understandable. Just as Hirst has created a business, with employees producing the art while he controls the process so that it's not even his hand at work (his 2012 show 'Two Weeks One Summer' attempted that and was almost universally panned by critics), there's a palpable sense of his overarching influence on the gallery too. The man has made millions drawing deeply from his own nihilistic philosophy on life and death to produce some of his best work; perhaps one should expect that, while no doubt reaping rewards by association, any attempt to generate an architectural space for such an ego might end feeling like a Faustian pact.