Viewing Cato at Saatchi Yates

Step into Saatchi Yates in St James’s this week where the gallery presents a new solo exhibition by Cato — the London-based, Brighton-born painter also known as Toby Grant. Spanning barbershops, diners, home interiors and music-filled studios, the canvases test a gentle, yet powerful, re-imagining of Black communal life. Cato doesn’t simply document reality — he constructs intimate, imaginative spaces populated by figures drawn from his South London orbit.

Technically, the works combine airbrush softness with painterly clarity, often exaggerating hands or heads to amplify gestures, mood and emotion. Hues are saturated, figures glow — expressions freeze into moments of stillness that feel cinematic in their clarity. In one painting, a barber-shop scene captures a sense of ritual: reverent, communal, as though the chairs and mirrors are altars to memory and identity. In another, musicians rehearse in a cramped studio — paintbrushes, canvases, even a dusty Picasso book on a table hint at art history and legacy, rooting the everyday in both personal and universal context.

With each scene, Cato invites visitors to inhabit spaces — imagined, remembered, and re-envisioned — where Black London life is visible, dignified, and full of quiet resonance.