By James Westcott



With its eclectic range of small to very small galleries, crammed booths, plethora of crazy sculptures and piles of flyers everywhere, Scope is the perennial jumble sale of art fairs, and the latest iteration at Basel is no different in this respect from those that have gone before over the last six years in London, New York, Miami and the Hamptons. But as at any jumble sale, you stumble upon a few gems in the clutter, and there's something very refreshing and appealing about the lo-fi approach of the fair, the lack of pretension and the hunger in the air for something more than just prestige and cash (though that would be nice too; there didn't seem to be too many people in attendance when I was there).

Among the 85 galleries from around the world (with a notable bunch from Korea), here are some pieces that stood out from a fair dominated by large, sleek and sarcastic fashiony photographs and paintings-from-photographs.

Fabio Paris gallery showed a series of portraits by Todd Deutsch of gamers in the act, their faces blank, vulnerable and transported as if in a religious revery:





At artSumer gallery from Istanbul, Tamar Hirschl showed gloopy, sticky looking vitrines, recalling the crusty and slightly dirty glitz and glitter of David Altmejd:



Hirschl has a thing for stags, and I'm adding this image to my swelling folder of artists painting, drawing and sculpting these apparently mystically attractive creatures. This one is stuffed full of garbage:



At Gagliarde Art System (from Turin), Fabio Viale showed this beauty, which looks something like a John McCracken with a fossilised tyre print in it and subjected to millenia of enormous geological forces:

By far the best booth at the fair was One and J Gallery, from Korea. As well as a tasty crisp semi-abstract archtiectural painting by Kim Suyoung, they showed a beguiling, melancholy and impressionistic painting by Park Jina, who is appearing in the Gwangju Biennial in Korea this October. Jina's work has an intimacy and easiness rare in paintings derived from the accidental, unbeautiful compositions of casual snapshots (this one is from one of those fun four-lens throwaways). It's also free from the sense of foreboding and aloofness that often infuses translations of photographs into paintings, the subtle smugness that the painting is more permanent than the fleeting digital image.



See more blogs on Basel:
Blogging Basel: The Last Night of the Fair
Blogging Basel: Shelter From the Storm at Volta
Blogging Basel: Dubai Next at the Vitra Design Museum
Blogging Basel: Early Manoeuvres by Paula Cooper and Marlborough Ga...
Blogging Basel: R&R With Lawrence Weiner's Porn Debut
Blogging Basel: Thomas Hirschhorn's Hotel Democracy Open for Busine...
Slouching Towards Basel: Seth Price and Warm-Up Night in Zürich