Browsing bookshelves, we often find titles that seem to speak directly to us— A book about small things, a book about lost love, or something about everything. We project our own experiences onto these phrases, filling the unseen pages with our imaginations. This quiet act of self-completion lies at the heart of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work: art that’s not just seen but activated in the mind of the viewer.

In their solo exhibition, Love songs for desperados, the British artist duo presents a series of new oil paintings that continue this open-ended, self-referential practice. Central to the exhibition is Some painted books (2025), their largest painting to date—24 panels featuring 690 hand-painted book spines. Other painted works, mostly single-panel bookshelves, are standalone chapters on themes such as studies on color palettes, incremental degrees, or cardinal directions on a compass. This series of A painting about ... (all 2025) is no different in this regard. Each painting feels both finished and incomplete, offering invitations rather than conclusions, leaving room for projection and reflection.

Their sculptures extend this logic into the third dimension. Simple configurations such as a school desk and chair obsessively colored in with a ballpoint pen, a wooden cloths dryer, or a coffee table with an apparently causally deposited book become vessels for imagined stories. With titles like Desk and chair, sense of an ending, or applied physics (all 2025), these pieces echo the duo’s early performances from the 1990s, when furniture and architecture weren’t passive props but protagonists. Muted in tone and formal in presence, these sculptures reveal a more introspective, even melancholic side of their practice—a counterweight to the vivid paintings and bold neon works.

Neons, a longtime element of their work, serve a different role here. Direct and self-aware, these luminous phrases, Words on the front of a building (2023), On/Off (2023), or Wall (2021), act like labels made manifest. Monumental in scale and shamelessly obvious, they don’t suggest but declare. Their clarity and visual punch leave an imprint that is both immediate and unmistakable.

Love songs for desperados offers an inward journey, where melancholy meets humour, and clarity coexists with ambiguity. It’s a snapshot of where Wood & Harrison are today—and an open book for anyone, regardless of how they may feel, to read themselves into.