Damien Hirst the Excellent Painter - Harald Peter Ström

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