Gerard Hemsworth "Outing"

It is a strange world conjured in the recent paintings of
Gerard Hemsworth. Strange, and yet familiar. Awkward,
and yet utterly at ease. The monochrome and the
architecture of the grid remain as a lingering spectre of
Modernist essentialist painting. Yet the shallow spaces that
these finely managed colour areas excavate have been
populated by cartoon rocks, grasses and cacti.

Are these landscapes barren deserts or minutely tended
botanic gardens? And, what is the difference in an age of
easy travel and exotic day-tripping? Both terrains seem
equally viable for the chequered picnic blanket to be
unfolded onto.

And, who is doing the picnicking? Have the visitors
momentarily departed the scene, or are these
anthropomorphic cacti our prickly proxies, or is this an
absurd unwitnessed place where the succulents themselves
sally forth on their own beanos?

As these possible narratives continue to coalesce and
contradict, it is back to the 20th century paintings that
parenthesise high Modernism that these new works
playfully return. The kooky aerial Cornish harbours of Ben
Nicholson seem rendered here in the enclosing rock forms;
the mute mannequins of de Chirico's empty town squares
reappear as latter day vegetative Madonna-and-Childs; even
the edge-articulating pours of Morris Louis are brought to
mind in the taller, spindlier specimens.

These paintings seem to ask how and why, with the lightest
of touch, with the oddest of means and signs, are we lulled
into constructing the silliest of scenes. Meaning - if it's okay
to presume that such a thing is still pursued in painting - is
not to be found here in the decoding of semiotic ciphers.
Meaning instead crystallises in the revelation that looking
and reading are playful and disquieting actions. Reward is
not achieved in the solving of a problem or in the punchline
to a joke, reward is found in the hovering state of not-
knowing.

Hemsworth is able to make the elegant appear ridiculous
and the ridiculous, elegant. This exhibition constitutes an
outing, but, like Bob Dylan's Bear Mountain Picnic, there are
no bears or mountains. There will however be a picnic.

Gerard Hemsworth studied at St Martin’s School of Art in
London in the mid 60’s and has exhibited internationally
since the 70’s. An influential artist and teacher, Hemsworth
was until recently the Professor of Fine Art and the Director
of the Master’s Programme in Fine Art at Goldsmiths,
University of London. In 2000 he won the Charles
Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Art London. He
lives and works in East Sussex, England.