What a shit show

Carl Kostyál is pleased to present What a shit show, London-based artist Callum Eaton’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following his debut Look but don’t touch in 2022.

In the years since, Eaton has exhibited internationally—in New York, Berlin and beyond—making this exhibition both a return and a recalibration. The new body of work marks a decisive shift: where Eaton’s earlier paintings explored fixtures of public space—the glowing Coke machine or the gleam of an escalator— What a shit show isolates fragments of daily life and gives them the gravity of artefacts. The ordinary and the catastrophic coexist, each painted with equal, hypnotic attention.

“These works pull the viewer into domestic scenes of daily ruptures and the strange allure to minute disasters. A burnt piece of toast becomes an omen; a flower in a bleach-bottle could be dismissed as trivial, yet its gesture echoes larger collapse. A fire-extinguisher’s gauge sits empty. A crashed car, or an e-bike handlebars held with one hand: these are moments poised on the edge of impact. They carry the euphoria of risk, the thrill before things go wrong. Eaton captures that tension; we feel exhilarated, then unsettled.

Technically, Eaton works with photo-realism at cut-out scale. The scenes are drawn from his own encounters—objects he has held or observed, then translated into painted fragments. This slow, methodical labour—each cut-out panel meticulously primed and layered—transforms the chaos of contemporary life into something fixed, still, and almost devotional. His eye for surface recalls the precision of Flemish realism. Eaton hides his own presence in small revelations: the reflection of his eyes in a mirror, the silver-chained hand steering. There’s a lineage, in that hyper-verisimilitude and quiet insertions that link Eaton to Velázquez or van Eyck—painters who, through mirrored glimpses, reminded us that someone is always looking back.

Yet his subjects are distinctly modern icons—totems of a culture entranced by its own debris. Inspired by his residency at the Christine Mack Foundation in New York earlier this year, Eaton’s America appears not as a landscape but a mood: a cinematic tension between speed and stasis. His use of cut-outs evokes Pop traditions—the shaped canvases of Tom Wesselmann, the billboard-cropping fragmentation of James Rosenquist. Like that tradition, Eaton fractures and reassembles domestic catastrophe, shimmering with gloss even as they hint at collapse.

For all their fastidiousness, Eaton’s images hum with irony. The title What a shit show gestures to the absurd simultaneity of our times—both personal and political. There’s a charge of adrenaline throughout these paintings, as if each were suspended in the split second before disaster: the Lime ride through city traffic, the engulfed car flickering in a rear-view mirror. These are paintings about spectacle, about the fetishisation of destruction, about the pleasure and dread of watching, and about the way we watch—and maybe how someone watches us in return.

As Susan Sontag urged us to “dethrone the serious,” Eaton’s paintings embody that provocation: an irony pill, playful yet incisive. They are more than snapshots of rupture—they are time-stamped icons of ruin rendered beautiful. In What a shit show, Eaton doesn’t moralise the spectacle of collapse; he frames it. Through humour, expertise, and obsession, he transforms the wreckage of everyday life into something momentarily whole—an image at once exquisite, absurd, and uncomfortably real.”