New contemporary art: Rupert Newman’s Altered Perspectives at the House of St Barnabas

The House of St Barnabas is packed full of fine art, with pieces by many artists including big names like Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers. Curated by The Collective, most works are for sale and as the House of St Barnabas is not only a club but a homeless charity, a percentage of all sales are donated to help London’s homeless back to work.

Unusually the club’s building in Soho includes a private chapel. To coincide with upcoming Frieze art week, projection mapping artist Rupert Newman and composer Sarah Warne have created Altered Perspectives, a site-specific audio-visual work that is currently showing in the nineteenth century Gothic-revival space.

Soaring choral voices fill the space as abstract projections focus on the apse, space invader bullets shoot up around the windows and prismatic patterns spin around. Coloured images shatter and disperse in an immersive 4 minute experience.

On a blank wall it would be an experiment in moving abstraction, inspired by Robert Delaunay’s desire to observe the movement of colours. Here there is an Anglo-Catholic backdrop of golden mosaics, whilst a large crucifix hangs over the centre of the projection space, the gold halo continual attracting attention. Combined with the ecclesiastical soundtrack the religious overtones are not leftovers of the space but part of the piece.

The viewers might be audience rather than congregation, but they collect at the back of the chapel and peer – like illiterate peasants of the past staring at the stories told by the stained glass. Here the stained glass moves and rotates at IMAX height. The narrative is abstracted, but the centrality of Jesus to the experience is impossible to escape.

The image shatters and the separate shards are brought back together behind the crucifix. As they break again and fade to nothing at the end, the last piece of light seen is the glint of Christ’s halo, reaching over the brokenness.

Presented by Rook and Raven gallery, rather than altering the chapel Altered Perspectives intensifies the existing religious sensibility of the space.