Evans is a place on Earth: Gross Chapel:In Attendance at the Fitzrovia Chapel.

I spent eighteen years working just across the road from the Grade II listed majesty that is the Fitzrovia Chapel and didn't ever go and take a look. Built in 1891/2 in the Victorian Gothic style by John Loughborough Pearson, it's something of a minor treasure. My first actual vist came about a year ago when Darren and I went to check out the pink marble head of Lawrence from Mozart Estate (and Felt, and Denim, and Go-Kart Mozart).

Miriam Cahn - mit kind fluchten 2.7+14.8.08 (2008)

Probably inspired by our visit, King Charles III gave last year's Christmas Day speech from the chapel. It'd be good if Lawrence's head had still been there for that and it would have been equally amusing if some of the exhibits from the chapel's current show, In Attendance:Paying Attention In A Fragile World, had somehow sneaked into the picture.

Some of them aren't that great (some are) but the King's Speech is pretty boring so anything to liven that up. I made my way, through the drizzle, to the chapel on Sunday to be confronted with a small, but well presented, selection of artworks from artists I'd heard of (Paula Rego, Etel Adnan, Phyllida Barlow, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Cathy Wilkes, Eve Sussman, and Rachel Kneebone) and artists I hadn't - all the rest of them.

The theme of the exhibition, which you'll get from the name, is 'attention' and philosopher Simone Weil's (1909-1943) idea that we can reimagine attention as 'a state of openness'. Not attention that seeks to learn, or gain, something but as a kind of empty gesture where we open ourselves up to receive and the artists here all share a desire to make work that is open to ambiguity and multiple interpretations.

In some cases, out and out confusion. Miriam Cahn's mit kind fluchten (or Escape withb Child) was the work that jumped out of me on first entering the chapel. A robotic, or alien, looking woman that still has something of the Renaissance about her. There is, you can hardly see it, a child in this painting and there is a warmth and fragility to it while at the same time something a bit cold and eerie.

As promised, no easy interpretation. Although it's easier to make sense of Cahn's work than it is Phyllida Barlow's. Lobbed on the floor it looks almost like masonry that has become dislodged although Barlow herself has described it as a "pastiche of the monumental". It's just as well she said that because I can't see anyone else thinking it.

Phyllida Barlow - Untitled:disaster 5 (2010)

Gabrielle Boyd - Presser (2024)

There's something figurative going on in Gabrielle Boyd's Presser but it's so intentionally vague, blurred even, that it's hard to comprehend what it actually is. I'm informed her work is about "intimacy, care and vulnerability" but I can't really get that from this one painting.

Not that it's unpleasant. Just unremarkable. Paula Rego is a great artist and I have written in depth about her before (more than once). 2011's St Mary of Egypt is far from her most impressive work but if you know Rego's work you will see that it fits very well into her canon. Touching, as it does - quite blatantly, on themes of the female experience and the human body in all its pain and ecstasy.

Paula Rego - St Mary of Egypt (2011)

Etel Adnan - Untitled (2000)

Etal Adnan's another artist who has been given the EIAPOE treatment before (and, like Rego, has since passed on - I hope my blogs aren't acting as a curse - though as Adnan lived to ninety-six and Rego to eighty-seven probably not) but looking at just this one work, inspired by Mount Tamalpais in the north of California - not far from San Francisco, it would be pretty hard to come to the conclusion that it is, apparently, about "memory, landscape and identity".

Ok, fair enough on the landscape but not sure about the memory or identity. Also it was quite hard to focus on this small work when there was a dead horse lying nearby - in the altar in fact. The Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere (who hopefully didn't have the horse killed herself - she didn't, it is confirmed that the 'colt' died of natural causes) is interested in exploring the nature of suffering (or the suffering of nature) in her work and she has been inspired by photographs of fallen horses on the battlefields of Ypres in World War I.

Berlinde De Bruyckere - Lost II (2007)

Eve Sussman - Serving the Milk (2004)

Anj Smith - Portrait of a Boy in a Glass (2013)

To be fair, it is quite powerful which is more than I can say for Eve Sussman's unimpressive Serving the Milk, a fourteen minute DVD in which pretty much nothing happens. It's part of a larger video project inspired by the art of Diego Velazquez's 1656 Las Meninas so, possibly, in context it would make more sense. The work is about 'waiting' but to be honest I got impatient and moved on.

To Anj Smith's more interesting Portrait of a Boy in a Glass. The themes here are supposed to be identity (it's always identity), gender, ecology, and anxiety and it's the last one, anxiety, that I read into this androgynous looking specimen's portrait. Why's he in a glass? It's supposed to be something to do with Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie but as I've never seen that play I don't know what to make of that.

These artists. They don't half bloody make you do the homework. Although Ghana's Emmanuel Awuni head, Red - made of memory foam among other things, looks pretty straightforward. Like something you might see in the V&A or the British Museum. But, no, apparently it should evoke the 'serene calm' of Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ (c.1450) which you can find about a mile down the road in the National Gallery and, to be honest, doesn't seem to have any connection with this memory foam head whatsoever. Except, it seems, in the mind of the artist. Looks cool though.

Emmanuel Awuni - Red (2023)

Cathy Wilkes - My Ashes Will Embrace You (2023)

Cathy Wilkes has chosen a title that wouldn't look amiss in a Tracey Emin exhibition and her work even reminds me of one of Emin's recent drawings - though an unfinished one - or one that is fading away. Which is fully intended. Initially, it looks rubbish but I quite like it. There's a sadness to it and it makes me ponder how everything goes away in the end. We lose our family, we lose our friends, we lose control of our bodies, and we even - eventually - start to lose our memories.

It's one of the works that best fits the remit of the show for me - though I appreciate I'd have a hard time convincing most people of that. Rachel Kneebone's porcelains, too, demand attention. Intricately carved, they seem to consist of figures who are either not yet fully formed or have lost body parts somewhere along the way.

There's an element of Hieronymus Bosch about Kneebone's work but she seeks more to engage than instruct (Bosch's paintings, it seems, were warnings to us to behave ourselves or we'd go to Hell - a Hell of his imagining). Of course the art just can't stand alone and the leaflet you pick up at the door squeezes in references to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roland Barthes but the homework I mentioned earlier really isn't necessary here. You can just enjoy Kneebone's wonderful creations as much as you can be shocked by De Bruyckere's dead horse, intrigued by Smith's boy in a glass, and forced to ponder absence and emptiness in the work of Cathy Wilkes. These works did demand attention. Some of the others did not. I headed back out in to the rain.