Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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DAMIEN HIRST
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From the Stuck Inn column on 3ammagazine.com
DAMIEN HIRST THE
EXCELLENT PAINTER
by Charles Thomson, co-founder of the Stuckists art group
Damien Hirst has exhibited a series of remarkable paintings. They are remarkable for their
depth and achievement, remarkable because Hirst, the hitherto superficial archconceptualist,
has done them, and remarkable because they have been unanimously
trashed by every critic in town.
Isolation is the starting point of the spiritual journey
The show, No Love Lost, at the Wallace Collection in London, is a spiritual odyssey, which
starts with Floating Skull (1,1), the simple depiction of an isolated skull, the dome
illuminated and the mouth lost in the blackness in which it floats. Hirst has likened this to a
lonely planet, and, in reproduction, that is exactly how it appears. However, the gallery
lighting - which I found appalling, but which is presumably deliberate - reflects beneath the
skull off the otherwise-invisible, wide brushstrokes, which, as a result, looked to me just
like visible wide brush strokes, though I have been told they look like water (and the skull
presumably a fluorescent buoy). It ruins the effect of a distant planetary body and is a
clumsy distraction from the essential content of a calm but isolated origin, whose potential
remains to be revealed.

A self-portrait: this is the artist's inner world and, he insinuates, ours
This potential begins to emerge in some small works measuring 24" x 16", where the skull
is set in a simple context of thin lines or rows of small circles. These cautious forays gain
in confidence, direction and complexity in bigger paintings, measuring up to 40" x 30", the
most significant of them on the opposite wall to the small works. A key development is the
outline of a table top in the bottom half of the canvas. This gives a geographical location,
suggestive of the home or studio environment of the artist. The skull is not one of a corpse,
but a self-portrait, demonstrating that externals have been stripped away and we have
entered the artist's inner reality, where the material world is experienced more as a
phantasm than a solidity, as shown by the thin outlines of an ashtray or cigarette packet
resting on the equally insubstantial table. The skull's sardonic expression in Skull with
Ashtray, Lemon and Cigarettes (11, 4) inquires if we recognise that this is our reality as
well.
The technical painting of the skulls is a combination of suggestion and definition.
Ambiguous marks suggest either sockets or eyes, and it is the viewer's mind that will make
the interpretation. Some of the background of the work has an effect comparable to a wiped
blackboard but with the chalk leaving a misty remnant. An obviously discordant feature is
the bright yellow shape of a lemon. It undermines the nihilistic complacency of the
proposition that the world is merely spectral, with a vividness of colour testifying that the
material reality of the senses cannot be so easily disposed of. It poses the question of how
two such seemingly different dimensions can co-exist, but does not find a resolution. The
yellow paint works aesthetically because it has been applied with just the right touch to
leave a slight coarseness round the edges. The cigarette in Skull with Ashtray, Lemon and
Cigarettes (11, 4) is delicately captured, whereas the pink lighter is a crude layer of paint
which fails to define its subject.
The top area of the paintings is marked out decoratively with restrained rows of circles,
dots or diamonds. White lines animate the surface, while evidencing the attempt to make
sense of reality by searching for connections within it. The untroubled void of empty space
in the first painting in the show has been relinquished for the yearning to find meaning. The
lines are evocative, when they are applied with focused care: the best in this respect are
Small Skull with Lemon and Ashtray (12, 2), Skull with Ashtray, Lemon and Cigarettes (11,
4) and particularly Glass of Water and Ashtray (14, 8). Hirst is a psychologically accurate
painter and succeeds technically when he paints with deliberation, but lacks virtuoso

painter and succeeds technically when he paints with deliberation, but lacks virtuoso
technique, and even small deviations into showmanship fall short. (A disastrously
slapdash, but fortunately small, painting, Skull (13, 19) from 2008, on the far end wall of the
show shows how easily he can lose his way.)
A projection of lines in a pie-slice shape coming out of the skull in Skull with Ashtray and
Lemon (10, 3) is a wobbly irrelevance, which, along with an misjudged small diamond
interrupting the vertical line to the right of the skull, weakens an otherwise strong painting.
Skull with Ashtray, Cigarettes, Lighter and Shell (9, 5) culminates in a frenetic rationality
with a maze of lines, which threaten to annihilate any coherence. It is unfortunate that this
effect is undermined by poor application, so the psychological impact of the lines takes
second place to the lazy white paint marks and the inept outlines of rectangles and
diamonds they define. The delicate tints of the shell hint at a direction which could be
explored much further.
A less insightful individual and less disciplined artist might well have been captivated by
the attraction of this mesh of lines and developed it into further abstraction. This is the
point where art becomes artificial and divorced from purposeful engagement. It is very
much to Hirst's credit that he dismisses such temptation in the works which follow, and
instead uses visual means to externalise inner states.
The paintings described so far (apart from Skull (13, 19)) were made 2006 - 2007. They
certainly have interest and accomplishment, although there is at times a hit and miss
quality to this. The following paintings from 2008, increasingly dramatically in size up to
80" x 51", represent a major achievement. However, on my first visit to the show, I felt they
were not successful and wrote that they had "generally overstretched his abilities." It was
only on my second visit that I could appreciate their classical and monumental presence,
and even more so during a third visit.
A masterpiece which defines the limits of rationality and asceticism
One series continues to use the central motif of the skull, and six of these paintings are
arranged as triptychs, the masterpiece being Men Shall Know Nothing (19, 6), which has
one skull in each of the three canvases and evokes the asceticism of a mediaeval monk's
cell. Any excess in the earlier work has been shaved away; the skull represents humanity at
the edge of mortality. The top half of each black-blue canvas is covered with a grid of white
spots, which tap out a relentless pattern like the clockwork passage of time, making
measurement but not meaning.
The white lines have the fineness of scalpel cuts, running vertically like scratches on an old
film, or radiating with nervous energy from the central skull with the precision of radio
waves sent into space and failing to find reciprocation from any distant form of life. There
is nevertheless a strong feeling of self possession and resolution, derived from taking the

is nevertheless a strong feeling of self possession and resolution, derived from taking the
path of self-denial to this extreme, and learning that there is nothing more that can be
gained from travelling further along it.
The barely, but neatly, defined table top remains a symbol of the domestic. The smudged
traces of disconnected spinal columns bookend the triptych, and hints of dark green
foliage at the bottom of each picture are a reminder of a hardly accessible natural world.
The triptych is a towering, albeit severe, achievement.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth (2, 7) is the other triptych, and, while not quite attaining the
formal perfection of Men Shall Know Nothing, is also monumental, consisting of just a skull
in each painting (along with a yawning shark's jaw in the right hand painting) with spectral
white lines, which seem on the point of dematerialising along with the occasional faint
objects they indicate - a table top, a glass, a beetle, and, at the bottom of the central
painting, what looks like a death mask in an embryonic sac, barely discernible and even
less so in reproduction. (It is worth mentioning that many of these paintings do not
reproduce well and the dark shades lose their impact in print form.) The lines make varied
and inventive divisions of the picture surface, and their irregular thinness creates a quiet
tension.
Other paintings in this series are of less significance, being subsidiary explorations of
similar themes. They incorporate a skull, an iguana, and what looks like shark dentures.
Whereas the use of gridded spots is a masterful transformative quotation from his earlier
conceptual work, the shark jaws do not transfer so well into two dimensions, and seem
more the remnant of old habits. Their white oval ring sits slightly uncomfortably in the
composition and adds nothing to the meaning of the work. Hirst may have been drawn,
whether consciously or unconsciously, to an echo of the screaming mouth in Francis
Bacon's Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, but, if so, it is a pun that
distracts from his real purpose.
Skull, Shark's Jaw and Iguana on a Table (21, 13) is sufficient, while its neighbouring work,
Shark's Jaw, Skull and Iguana on a Table (23, 14) is near-identical, but with the components
clumsily pushed together. Iguana with Skull and Shark's Jaw (22, 16) repeats the
arrangement, but with a second row of teeth in the middle of the open shape of the shark's
jaw, so that it looks as though somebody had accidentally used Photoshop's cloning tool. It
is a not very clever cleverness of the kind that Hirst needs to avoid. When he does, as in
Shark's Jaw and Iguana (24, 15), he again achieves an enduring image, albeit a tad
weakened by his decision to colour the tail with Naples yellow. This is also done in the
previous three paintings mentioned, where it is even more out of place, an arbitrary
intrusion, not being justified either in terms of meaning or aesthetics, and representing only
another unsuccessful tentative attempt at a bravura touch.

The confrontation with pagan power antipodal to western Christian culture
A slightly dreamy, wistful and folklorish medium size painting, Woman of the Woods (3, 21)
leads into a set of four large works, which seem at first sight to be straight out of the
studios of Abstract Expressionism, but of a dark intensity, which makes most works of that
school look like kindergarten colouring books and even Rothko's sombre effusions
lightweight in comparison. The large skull-themed paintings of a Christ-less, Christian,
ascetic and rational spirituality have here their counterbalance in depictions of a primeval,
pagan, purposeful, but seemingly amoral and formless, power.
These are, however, figurative paintings, and in The Birth of Medusa (4, 24) the trunks of
trees rise to the top of the painting like flames turned to ice, while a shape in the centre of
the image is roughed in with a raw red, suggestive of some corporeal vestige, a bloody
embryo or a flayed heart. Thin lines descend like white hot wires. A dark vertical stripe
bisects the painting (as it does with the three companion paintings) like a dark generative
power from - or a narrow doorway to - an even denser primordial level. When I first saw it, I
forgot the genteel surroundings and entered the reality of the painting to be struck by a
moment of fear.
Either side of this painting are Guardian I (6, 25) and Guardian II (7, 23). Both are more
complex than The Birth of Medusa and contain the vestiges of the grid of spots which the
central painting does not have. More disturbing is the apparition in Witness at the Birth of
Medusa (5, 22), where the barely-discernable form of the witness is almost effaced by
shredded trees and incessant vertical lines like razors slashing the air and dismembering
the comprehension of the figure in the face of what he encounters. The v-shape of what
appears to the beating wings of a bird are above him, either descending with unseen claws
about to sink into invisible eyes or arising as the dark messenger of what has been
witnessed. At the bottom of the picture there is the faintest outline of a table and an
ashtray. The witness is the artist and the setting is where it has been all along, in the
familiar everyday, which almost disintegrates in this near-psychotic storm.

The resolution of a spiritual journey, the cosmic in the mundane
Hirst has already declared an agenda of "going more towards Rembrandt and away from
Bacon". Rembrandt is noted for his integration of darkness and light. At the end of the
show, Hirst's Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies (25, 20), celebrates the grail attained at
the end of a spiritual odyssey. The continuation of the colours of dark blue and white relate
the painting to the rest of the exhibition. The starting motif of the skull has been
transubstantiated into a spray of white roses in a vase, which takes its place alongside
settled outlines of a glass of liquid and a cigarette packet on a table top. The constellation
of butterflies across the dark depths of the background creates the effect of a star-filled
sky, or the emanative force at the creation of the universe. It is a visual equivalent to
Blake's "Auguries of Innocence":
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
After the bleak purgatorial journey and the dark night of the soul, where everything nonessential
was stripped away and inhuman power was confronted face to face, it is a
celebration of joy, beauty and wonder, a spiritual healing and illumination. The requiem is
for the death of death.
Hirst's previous conceptual oeuvre stands in contrast to this work as a series of studies for
it - literally the concepts which now inform his paintings, where the infinitely more subtle
and flexible capability of paint is able to bring his meaning into fruition with a previously
unachievable clarity and force of expression. In order to do this, he has on the whole wisely
recognised as a painter his limitations, within which he has defined and mastered the
approaches and motifs necessary to realise a highly focused vision. This is not the end of
the journey, or even the map for it, but rather a first step from one stage of personal and
artistic life to the next. As an initial body of paintings it is an outstanding achievement.
The numbering in the book "No Love Lost" differs for most paintings from the show numbering.
The numbers in brackets show the book number first and the show number second.
See also:
Damien Hirst and the Reactionary Critics

Damien Hirst's Paintings Reviewed by Stuckists
Damien Hirst the Stuckist
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