AT THE STILL POINT OF THE DANCE: JAMES DEARLOVE’S THE TRILLING WIRE AT GALERIEPCP, PARIS
- Elliot Joseph Burr
- Sep 20
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 21
On Saturday 6th September, sticky in the Paris weekend swelter, I went to Le Marais’ galeriepcp for the opening of Ingram Prize-winning Neoromantic painter James Dearlove’s new show, The Trilling Wire, in collaboration with Gertrude The Art App, Dearlove’s first solo presentation in France.
Installation photograph courtesy of Dom Moore
His last show, 2023’s Tales of the City, Tales of the Sea at Brushes With Greatness was surreally dread-inducing: three rooms of full-immersion Baconesque uncanniness – warped faces, pallid strung-out bodies, deep-sea creatures and bizarre chimeras, in dark flats, nautical nowheres and urban landscapes rendered alien by blank repetition. The generalised weirdness would occasionally rupture into the outright apocalyptic. There were moments of serenity, but the ultimate effect was of a glitchy, visceral tornado.
The Trilling Wire, whose name is taken from arch-modernist T.S Eliot’s 1936 poem Burnt Norton, presents a significant shift from that show. Here, Dearlove redeploys and iterates on many familiar motifs from his rich symbolic vocabulary – birds, bodies, anonymous figures, urban and nautical scenes – but now he does mostly without Tales’ dark atmosphere. Instead, The Trilling Wire feels warmer, more playful and vivid. The show’s centrepiece, Four Figures with Birds (2025), exemplifies this:
James Dearlove, Four Figures With Birds, 2025
Here is one of Dearlove’s familiar settings – endless, anonymous towerblocks, modelled on those in London’s Bermondsey, stretching down into a hazy fog or flood – and here are his familiar nude figures. But there’s a new warmth to the colour palette, a new liveliness in the dancing pose of the central figure. Disquiet still murmurs – see the foetal figure on the bottom right, or the leftmost spectral stander’s baffled speechlessness – but it’s marginal, warmed by the glow of that spectacular upper-third lightshow, with its pinks and golds.
In the biggest shift from his previous shows, Dearlove has started to insert fine, delicate still lifes – of birds, vased flowers, broken eggshells; traditional elements of the European vanitas tradition – into the foreground of his paintings, letting them coexist in tension with the strangeness of his old subjects. In Still Life with Parakeet (2025), elegant objects provide an intense contrast with the sweeping, apocalyptic background familiar from his other works.
James Dearlove, Still Life With Parakeet, 2025
The objects Dearlove choses to interpolate tend to be laden with traditional symbolism – broken eggshells and loss of innocence, parakeets and colonial wealth, daffodils and vanity – but, for me, perhaps because of their status as inserted into Dearlove’s more usual subjects, they seem evacuated of any inherited portent. The parakeet most directly point to this, lying dead. Their placement doesn’t evoke their traditional symbolism; it’s more about their relationship to the other depicted subjects. What does a daffodil have to do with a tower block? Maybe it’s a copout, but I think the question – the relationship of disparity – is itself the point. Per Dearlove:
"Like Eliot I assemble disparate voices, images, and references to form a cohesive yet multifaceted whole. The 'trilling wire' itself evokes the plucked string of a musical instrument or bow, communication networks, electrical wires, nets—all things pertinent to our times—as well as the taut, humming living force running through everything.”
Installation photograph courtesy of Dom Moore
So there’s a modernist sensibility here, an instinct to collide data from heterogenous sources, but not strictly to combine them – rather to let them stand in sharp contrast. This is especially striking in Four Figures with Birds (2025), shown above. The titular passerines seem incongruous: they have no apparent interaction with the human figures and seem to have flown in, not just from beyond the frame, but from outside of the depicted world. They appear to overlay the rest of the image, in a manner reminiscent of the digital superimposition you might achieve with Photoshop.
This quasidigital collision of visual layers suggests a fragmenting and recombination of worlds and discourses akin to that evoked by Eliot. Alongside this, there’s the translucency of the rooftop figures, who seem both in and out of the world at once in a more traditionally supernatural manner: spectrality, the collision not just of spaces or discourses but also of times. Even alternative modes of collision coexist in this work.
I’m reminded of Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, whose narrator is preoccupied with collisions between alternate worlds and temporalities. In particular I think of his ekphrasis of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (1879):
The museum placard says that Bastien-Lepage was attacked for his failure to reconcile the ethereality of the angels with the realism of the future saint’s body, but that “failure” is what makes it one of my favorite paintings. It’s as if the tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of temporality, produces a glitch in the pictorial matrix; the background swallows her fingers.
In Dearlove’s work, the same tension Lerner observes in LePage’s painting ceases to appear as a failure and ascends to the level of method. I mark such an effacing of otherwise highly-detailed figures also in another standout, Three Figures with Nets (2025), where the nets seem to overpower and anonymise their own makers:
James Dearlove, Three Figures With Nets, 2025
Perhaps this is point: the detail. This spectral quality, while consistent, isn’t omnipresent and doesn’t render the works abstract. Dearlove pays close attention to the Real. His people are as lovingly rendered as his eggshells and birdfeathers; I particularly love this quality in Two Figures with Moon Moth (2025), where the carnivalesque undercurrent of other paintings flourishes into a depiction of a Pierrot “sad clown” figure, well-suited to a Paris exhibition.
The highlight here is Dearlove’s flawless anatomical work, which is rigorously real. Those feet! Their tendons! But Dearlove’s trademark modernist contrast is still apparent; in the foreground, the print from the newspaper on which Dearlove often paints shows through, and the clown’s shadowed chest is overpowered by the blue of the carpet.
Per galeriepcp, drawing from his experiences as a queer person navigating both urban and rural environments, Dearlove continues to explore the in-between worlds where transformation becomes possible. His paintings capture what he describes as "the fragility and intensity of existence," creating works that resonate with symbolic meaning while leaving room for ambiguity and introspection.
This preoccupation with liminality resonates with Burnt Norton. That poem – itself constructed partly from numerous combined scraps of other Eliot works – amounts to a meditation on time, on the primacy of the present over the past or the future: “Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is”.
In the white basement of galeriepcp, as a sort of appendix to the main show, hang three small paintings. My favourite of these is Still Life with Revellers (2025).
James Dearlove, Still Life With Revellers, 2025
The delicately-rendered eggshells, bird and flower are beautiful and foregrounded. In their perfect stillness and clarity, they contrast with the hazy, lively dancers behind them. But it’s a reciprocal relationship; the still lifes give the dancers clarity, and the dancers give the still life energy. “Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
Elliot Joseph Burr is a writer and editor in London.
