Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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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.
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Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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