I walked past @_workplace_ in Fitzrovia, saw the work through the window and just had to go in.

I walked past @workplace in Fitzrovia, saw the work through the window and just had to go in.

Wang Pei (b. 1989, China, now based in Barcelona) paints with such an intensity. Light catching the wet of an eye, skin built up in translucent layers, every crease rendered in meticulous detail. He works in casein tempera, an ancient milk-based paint and a slow, tactile medium in an age built for speed. A traditional method of painting that feels almost radical now for the kind of slow looking these paintings asks of you.

But it’s not just technical brilliance that drew me in. The show is called Sertraline and these works are a meditation on emotion in a world where our feelings are increasingly managed, medicated, optimised and fed back to us by the platforms designed to keep us engaged. What do we lose when emotion gets regulated, smoothed over, controlled?

Go and see this exhibition if you can.