Walking into the vaulted room at 21 Plympton Street and seeing over 300 vibrant, anarchic drawings swarm the walls I couldn’t help but think of Morgan Freeman discovering 2,000 notebooks in the movie Se7en, or Henry Darger’s landlords discovering thousands of pages of writing and hundreds of watercolours after his death. Then I began to worry that my gut reaction was ignorant and insensitive stereotyping so I read the gallery handout. It explained the artist spent seven years in a mental hospital as a child and was subsequently kidnapped when he was fourteen. So it turns out my initial read wasn’t that far off the mark.

Normally my humour isn’t so crass in my reviews but I think the artist can take it, based on two facts. One is that his hand-written captions on the wall are often dripping in sarcasm or dry wit. The other is that Collings’ also spent years dishing it out. He was a writer, producer and presenter of many BBC documentaries about art and artists, spent four years as the editor of Artscribe magazine, and is the author of Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, which humorously chronicled the rise of the Young British Art (YBA) movement.

The thing is, I didn’t learn any of that until I researched him after the show, during which I also looked into the kidnapping story. What I found left me just as confused and amused as many of the captions that accompany his drawings. Decoding them is a bit like reading a novel whose protagonist is an untrustworthy narrator prone to favour emotion over fact. The figures are famous but the scenarios are loaded with half truths and anecdotes that aren’t so much about their target as they are the artist.

It wasn’t long after I started viewing the works that I stopped looking at the imagery altogether and just read the commentary. Their imagined scenarios, personal recollections, and polarised statements about current events that make mainstream political cartoons look timid were an insightful avenue into Collings’ mindset. Accompanied by scratchy illustrations that look like a mashup of crayon, ink and pastel, each one is a stark visualisation of inner monologues that range from mildly introspective to the kind of rant you might hear someone shouting at the news after a few too many pints.

The drawings themselves were begun in 2020. A lot of people succumbed to depression during the lockdowns but it seems Collings mostly got angry. Art investors and politicians get the worst of his ire but thankfully the work on display isn’t just outrage. Stories of his youth and family often feature, with occasional tributes to his favourite musicians. The bulk of the targets are famous artists, which makes sense once you know Collings’ history as a critic although art history pedants and sycophants might take umbrage at the way a few sacred cows are depicted.

Anyone can passionately illustrate an angry emotion. Once. You can draw disgust and scribble sadness. Once. But to do it over and over and over again, hundreds of times without any of your marks looking like they contain any less vitriol than the first, takes a special kind of talent and focus. Long may these continue.