Bob & Roberta Smith @ The Grey Gallery

Hawke and Hunter is an unusual venue but currently the ideal choice for those desperately seeking midnight encounters with art. Turn a blind eye to the bling if you must. The new series of works by Bob and Roberta Smith lovingly transcribes a Guardian sports writer’s review of a Louise Bourgeois exhibition.

Steve Bierley’s first and intimate foray into an artist’s labyrinthine world has been playfully rendered. The work is like a series of nine large illuminated manuscripts, painted boldly from a kinky palate. There is an enjoyable circularity about the journey, from review, to painting, to review. It is not often that a critic is taken so literally. By reiterating the review the sentiment is amplified, but split up into panels the meaning is partially obscured. But, I know as well as you do that it is not always good to fly your flag directly from the mast. Here form has lifted a painterly finger to function.

Central to my experience of Bob and Roberta Smith is some unfettered innocence in both approach and delivery. The work in all its shambolic reverie smacks of the perpetual thrill of the chase, of the professional amateur. Unlike in sport, it is hard to tell who the winners and losers are in art. Bierley’s deft writing is shaded in angst and perturbance, yet this exhibition summons up optimism. If we could siphon this off we would be high on the fumes of hope, or accountability. Now that would be truly dangerous.