Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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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
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Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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