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TOM ELLIS, MOT, London, June 22 - July 21 2007
Tom Ellis invites us to take a walk up Klever Strasse where the architect appears to be a lazy drunken clown, with abandoned paintings, slacker expletives and a Berlin beer table. Even the Gallery has had its name inverted to become the artist. But then we are given glimpses of sharp wit and skilled craftsmanship when we realise that the artist has also designed the office furniture, a resplendent red glass table that spells out the word GONER, a prediction perhaps for the gallerist or curator that sits behind it?

But before you can slap yourself knowingly on the back, we�re back to dumb with a hastily painted self-portrait on a scrappy piece of sheet timber, which itself has been attached to sliding door mechanisms allowing the work to literally travel across the wall like some collapsing clown car.


As we enter the main space, what appears, at first, to be a bizarre grouping of pseudo-modernist paintings, soon turn out to be the slacker musings of Ellis as he mixes purposefully dumb sentence construction with deconstructions of Picasso and Goya. These are again on sliders that turn the oversized paintings into doors or give them the option of somewhere to go, but too little room to move. This sounds like a clumsy metaphor for the many dead ends of painting, but in Klever Strasse, dumb is Klever, and if you are in any doubt as to how to wear your hang ups, Ellis has installed a German Beer Tisch for the audience to sit and contemplate, Tr�s Pass�, Fucker in a Landscape, The Lazy Thieving Cunt and of course, Fuck It.