“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport…”
There was a time when that line from Love Actually felt disarmingly tender. Today, it sounds almost provocative. The world has grown louder, more anxious, more brittle. We discuss crises, fractures and cultural fatigue with fluency. But the word “love” is handled with caution, as though it belongs not to serious discourse but to a seasonal greeting card.
And yet there is a pattern too persistent to ignore: when everything collapses, people do not write to one another “I was right.” They write “I love you.”
It was with something close to professional scepticism that I stepped into The Lido Stores in Margate on 14 February for Memento Amoris – Remember love. Remember to love. Remember, you must love. On a day when love most often curdles into decorative ritual, I encountered instead a carefully constructed artistic argument.
123 answers to a difficult question
The fifth iteration of the annual Alt Valentine’s open call has become the largest in the gallery’s history. From more than 1,200 submissions, curator and gallery owner Kristen Healy selected over 120 artists, transforming both rooms into a dense, charged space of conversation.
The curatorial formula is deceptively simple: 123 artists, 123 works, each one an autonomous statement on love. The result is not a themed exhibition but a polyphonic philosophical text, unfolded across the walls. Almost Platonic in its structure: love as interior energy, as archetype, as a form of rootedness in the world.
Three works stayed with me in particular, each speaking of love in an entirely different register.
Broughton & Birnie, Hygge 2Oil on canvas, 30.8 × 25.4 x 3cm, 2025
Kevin Broughton & Fiona Birnie
There is no familiar romantic narrative in Hygge 2. What held me was its state of inward concentration. A soft glow, the density of golden tones, creates a sense of warmth that is not directed outward. This is not love as declaration or gesture. It is love as equilibrium.
The title, Hygge, is exact. This is not decorative cosiness but a condition of protection and composure. Kevin Broughton and Fiona Birnie present love not as passion or drama but as the capacity to hold warmth within oneself.
Within the broader context of the exhibition, this feels like a subtle pivot. Love need not always be oriented towards another person; it can be a state one sustains internally – a source, a quiet, enduring flame.
Ilona Pimbert
llona Pimbert, VenusMonoprint & cyanotype on Somerset paper, unique, 14.8 × 21cm, 2025.
If Hygge 2 speaks of interior warmth, Venus expands the scale.
There is no classical goddess here, no recognisable figure. Instead, a field of living matter. No body is defined, yet the sensation of birth is palpable.
The work reads as a meditation on love through the feminine principle – not through the romanticised image of a woman, but through the idea of woman as origin. Ilona Pimbert does not treat love as a private emotion but as a primal force: the force of generation, continuation, attraction.
The feminine is not illustrated; it is present as principle. In an exhibition where love frequently appears as emotion, Venus recalls its foundational dimension.
In this sense, Pimbert’s Venus is not a quotation from myth but an archetype. Woman here is equal to love in the same way that love is equal to the universe: not directed at someone, but permeating everything as the primordial energy from which the world emerges and within which it continues.
Regina Rzaeva
Regina Rzaeva. Oil on paper, 30 x 40cm, 2026
In a room where love most often resonated as a feeling between people or as archetypal force, the work of Regina Rzaeva stood apart by speaking of something else entirely. This was love directed towards nature without sentimentality, without theatrical flourish. Rzaeva’s painting struck me as the most restrained in the room, and for that reason I returned to it a second time.
The composition is constructed so that the viewer does not stand before the painting but already within it. The verticals of the trees establish a living biological rhythm; a slight asymmetry prevents the space from lapsing into decoration and preserves its breath. Green is not a backdrop here but a living environment. Its multiple tones – translucent, deep, saturated – create a sense of pulsation, while light seems to germinate from grass and air alike. The boundary between space and viewer dissolves.
After the exhibition, I explored Rzaeva’s wider portfolio. Her practice reveals a careful attentiveness to reality and a desire to uncover the latent meanings embedded in ordinary things.
Within Memento Amoris, her work matters because it reminds us that love is not confined to human bonds. It can be directed towards the living world itself – not as metaphor, not as abstraction, but as an acknowledgement of nature’s intrinsic value.
In Rzaeva’s painting, love of nature manifests as calm recognition of its significance. And perhaps that is love’s most difficult form: not possession, not admiration, but respectful acknowledgement.
Memento Amoris runs at The Lido Stores until 15 March. There is still time to walk this route and witness how more than a hundred artists speak of love in different tongues and how no single language exhausts it.
And in that chorus of voices, one hears the words from the First Epistle to the Corinthians: love never fails.
