With Profit (2017) kennardphillipps have produced a contemporary Scream. Continuing a series that uses the salmon hued pages of the Financial Times as a ground, Theresa May’s face is strafed with asset management figures.

Her eyes have been put out but this is no Santa Lucia, the virgin martyr from Syracuse whose death at the hands of the Romans resulted in her becoming patron saint of the blind. May’s charcoal lip-sticked mouth agape, the blind bling portrait of the PM garners no pity. And nor should it. You can almost hear that robotic hectoring tone we’ve been subjected to ever more so of late.

The self-serving lies, her volte face brand of politics, May epitomises a Tory tendency toward bullying the weak and sucking up to the rich and powerful. If Lucia means light, the root of the name Theresa is derived from a Greek word for harvest, or reaper. And what is it her government seem hell-bent on doing? Who is going to benefit from her belligerent, patronising, mean-spirited approach to statecraft? Not the NHS or student nurses, not the low-paid, not the disabled or other minorities… The only people who will profit from May’s approach to both domestic and international politics – an obscene mixture of cowardly evasion and mealy-mouthed arrogance – are those very few with enough money to cushion themselves against the worst effects of her myopic and insular Conservativism.

Robert Montgomery’s Psychic Love Wave (2017) affords us a salve of sorts. His poetic interventions have a healing effect whether they’re adorning a housing project wall, a billboard or written in fire against a vast dusk skyline. But much more than Romantic gesture, Montgomery’s works rile at a complacency that’s seen liberal values rolled back in recent years. His conceit that what we need is a mammoth dose of Modernism to counteract a dearth of kindness, of compassion, of love, is just as much provocation as plaintive cry.

At the beginning of a new millennium the artist is resurrecting an energy that has been a transformational force – in cultural, scientific, technological and political terms – for more than a hundred years. Given the current turn to a small-minded protectionist mindset Montgomery’s message would seem to be a timely, perhaps urgently needed contribution to the public realm. ‘We’re in danger of walking over a precipice, falling into an ecological, social, political abyss. I want to remind people that Modernism equates to a liberating, civilizing force.’