Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Organ NOVEMBER 14, 2025 - by Sean Worrall

BRIAN ENO'S BLOCKS, LAST NIGHT'S OPENING NIGHT AT PAUL STOLPER GALLERY AND HIM WANTING TO MAKE THINGS HE LIKES...

And so, Brian Eno and his blocks. Brian Eno; musician, Roxy and such, producer, composer, artist, a man with an asteroid named after him, so Brian Eno painted a whole load of wooded blocks...

"Eno started by making large cut-out stencils which he set down across numerous panels and sprayed through, resulting in positive painted shapes. By spraying over found shapes and dried pasta, either deliberately placed, or randomly dropped, negative painted shapes appeared on the panels below. More congested areas would reveal much busier compositions, where others with few shapes and paint covering emerged more quiet and minimal. Throughout the process Eno was picking out pieces as they seemed finished, leaving gaps to be filled with other blocks. A block stayed in circulation until it 'got somewhere'. Hugely enjoying the dramatic oppositions of composition and colour offered by the remaining panels, Eno adopted a very different curatorial approach to the project. From these he made a small series of works, each one made up of four panels, measuring 31x31cm, whilst leaving a 5x5 cm square gap in the centre, again referencing the positive and negative shapes made in the painting process".

It is a process one or two of us might have indulged in before, the laying out of a whole load of small same size-uniting blocks on a gallery table and then painting them all at the same time, spray cans, stencils, shapes, pasta always seemed a little too obvious. It is an enjoyable process, a instinctive one, and if your instinct is right then yes can almost satisfy even if it ultimately isn't that revolutionary. I probably did it first as a teenage art student, I might have even be listening to one of those early Roxy Music albums as I did it, the brilliance of Ladytron and such. Enough of that, we're not here for all this, we are here for Brian Eno's blocks, his Blocks. Apparently the gallery website crashed when the pieces went on sale yesterday, the day before the opening. At £500 a time, despite the crash, most of the pieces in here have the little orange (rather than the usual red) 'sold' dot next to them.

"I want to make things in new ways. I want to make things I like. I want to find out what I really like. At a time when there are thousands of voices - ads, columnists, corporations, influencers - telling me what I should like, I want to get in touch with what it is that I actually do like. I think that is the value of art: to remind us what really matters to us." - Brian Eno, 2025

So Brian Eno painted a whole load of small wooded blocks, lots of them, hundreds of them, sold straight away (at five hundred quid a pop) and yes, they did all look rather good together up there on the gallery wall as people chatted away and the occasional person asked the artist to signs a CD and such and who knows if people are buying them just because they were painted by Brian Eno. That is really up to you to decide. It all felt a little random to me, a touch subdued maybe? Did they need a little more in terms of positive repetition? Did he hold back? Did I?

Paul Stolper Gallery is found at 31 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH (a short walk from Tottenham Road tube station). The exhibition runs until Saturday January 17, 2026. The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 10am until 6pm (5pm on Saturdays).