Review: a sunflower, six trees, three birds and two horses (one with wings)

Andrew Sim at The Modern Institute, Osborne Street

As a child, I was told that it was bad luck to speak when passing a monkey puzzle tree. An enormous one stood on the main road near my school and my friends and I would mime zipping our mouths shut as we approached it. This memory came back to me when I saw the monkey puzzle tree at the centre of Andrew Sim's second Modern Institute show.

Folklore passes from generation to generation, yet few think of looking up the original story or studying how it spreads. According to the exhibition handout, the trees relate to one that was planted near Sim's home “on a patch of grass the artist has still never approached.” In some parts of Britain, it is believed that the Devil sits in the tree and that you need to be quiet so as not to attract his attention.

In the gallery there was no need to speak, but it was difficult not to be bewitched by this ethereal pastel 'portrait' of the tree on a black background. The many phallic branches, tipped with yellow cones, seem to glimmer.

The other pastels, also on black backgrounds, have the same glow though the birds and the horses veer into cartoony escapism. Far more troubling, especially on a late April afternoon, are the canvases depicting artificial Christmas trees. Compared to the monkey puzzle with its rough sensuality, these refer to the queer sense of being out of time and out of place.

The title of the exhibition is as literal as it could possibly be. It is as if there is enough symbolic charge not already present in the work that any more would confuse things. And the works resonate if you allow the unconscious to respond in silence without excess chatter of the conscious mind. With the devil in the branches of the monkey puzzle tree this is probably a good thing.