Auguries of Innocence

Auguries of Innocence is an exhibition of new works by ten painters currently working in Britain, and who were all recently featured in the seminal Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting Volume 3. Named after an 1803 poem by William Blake, verses which chime with the pressures and demands of modern life, Auguries of Innocence displays bellwether works that probe the social, political, and artistic conditions of Britain today. Encompassing a range of aesthetic styles, from abstracted landscapes to sumptuously realistic portraits, and including those led by distinctly contemporary narratives to those riffing off the High Renaissance and the fin-de-siecle, the exhibition is a snapshot of the state of play of contemporary painting.

Artists: Anthony Banks, Sara Berman, Lindsey Bull, Victoria Cantons, Jai Chuhan, Marcus Cope, Jasmir Creed, Yulia Iosilzon, Kathryn Maple, Gideon Rubin.

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
 —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”, 1803

From at least the moment when the French painter Paul Delaroche set eyes on a Daguerreotype photograph and declared ‘From today, painting is dead!’ the medium has suffered a successive wave of crises of its legitimacy. Think, too, about Jörg Immendorff’s well-known, paradoxical, and fast-scrawled painting Hört auf zu malen, roughly translated as ‘Stop painting’ as another startled moment of recognition: painting must be stopped, painting is dead, long live painting. As David Hockney put it, in his Secret Knowledge documentary: ‘We thought we saw the twentieth-century, on the news, film, and elsewhere, better than any previous century, but we could say that we did not see it at all: a camera did… up to a hundred-and-sixty years ago all images were made by artists; chemicals replaced them.’ Unlike Delaroche’s age, ours is saturated by images, all the time, on an endless carousel of screens: we consume them like air, and we are driven to distraction by them. Such a moment might herald another crisis of faith in painting, that ancient and venerable medium, seemingly so out of kilter with the rhythms of the time and yet, as has happened several times before and will no doubt take place ad infinitum, those crises of attention has been the kiss of life to kickstart painting’s old ticker once more. Over the last decade, British painting (including, of course, those born elsewhere and now settled in Britain) has undoubtedly enjoyed a resurgence and, pushing back against a broader tide of debilitating arts funding cuts and closing of art school programmes, produced some of the most compelling painters since the School of London in the early 1950s. While painting may have had several funerals by this point, we should no longer mourn, nor be surprised to hear the knock knock knock on the underside of the coffin once again.

The artists assembled in the present exhibition were all featured in the Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting Vol. 3, published by the inimitable Matt Price, British painting’s visionary purveyor of art books, alongside Anneka French, Anomie’s remarkable editor. After the first two instalments—the second of which arrived just at the right time, contemporaneously with the Hayward Gallery’s major survey, Mixing it Up: Painting Today, in 2021—the third edition of the anthology is the largest yet. I was glad to contribute to about a dozen essays and was struck by the breadth of styles collated by Price and French: all artists at different stages of their careers, from senior figures exhibiting at major museums to emerging artists presenting some of their first commercial gallery exhibitions. On the basis of the volume, British painting is more than merely alive. It’s thriving.

Anthony Banks is one of the most spirited painters working in the British landscape tradition. Banks’ depictions of the provincial English countryside, especially those liminal spaces between the industrial and the agricultural, the town and the village far from the city limits, make him a radical traditionalist or, perhaps more accurately, a traditional radical, who breathes fresh life into the landscape genre. While so many painters—quite rightly—have taken the city as their subject, the grit and the grime of the urban environment—Banks turns to those places, often overlooked or ignored, and transforms them from likeness in the most revolutionary ways.  Banks’ Bridge and Barge is an archetypal example: while we can quite certainly identify the titular subject, the surface of the painting is so wrought, cut through with palette knife and heaving with impasto, it almost looks like an action painting of gestural abstraction. Look at the way the paint seeps and bleeds on the right: it is as though the liquidity of the subject (the water underneath the bridge) is actualised in the form of the paint.

Kathryn Maple, whose work varies in subject from natural forms, trees and landscapes, to figures and buildings, is represented here by Night Walk Home. As with those works displayed in Under a Hot Sun at the Walker Art Gallery in spring 2023, the subject of my contribution on Maple for the Anomie Review, Maple’s painting is surreal, strange, and yet intimate; in the loose rendering of humanoid forms in the foreground, whether in eerie solitude or in informal communion with others, the visible accumulation of brushstrokes are held in absolute concert with the underpainted environment beneath. Maple’s works speak to the ways in which we are all endlessly documenting moments in our lives, both the mundane and the revelatory, with snapshots to be shared or held close. She captures something about how we see within the world, asking us to take note of what we notice and why, and of seeing the world as a perpetual repository for new images, as well as what we see when we look.

Indian-born, London based artist Jai Chuhan is also an artist of revelation. Her densely-layered pictures masterfully capture the human form in a swish of brushstroke; deeply-held emotions are held and conveyed in but a squiggle or line. Her diptych, Weeping Woman, lifts its title from Picasso’s most famous portrait, his gut-wrenching depiction of Dora Maar crying over Guernica and held at the Tate. In difference, while Maar’s defined features are swiftly recognisable once we know it to be her, Chuhan’s distraught woman is anonymous, wailing into the void. It is extraordinary how much feeling is contained here, condensed in such little space.

Marcus Cope’s paintings are interested in the depths, dregs, and recesses of memory. In Digging in the Past, we find ourselves in a fantastical landscape with defined strata of colours in the sky, as though a rainbow has etched itself into the geological time of a tree trunk, as a desperate figure crouching ankle-deep in a ravine. He is digging, one assumes, for some kind of treasure, or something lost and perhaps to be regained, in time. Once one alights on a possible narrative explanation for the work, though, we are dragged back into someplace else: on the surface of the picture is a giant globule of rainwater or perhaps a single tear, which overlays the landscape with a profound sense of pathos. A century after André Breton signed off the Surrealist Manifesto, Cope is excavating newly realised surrealist worlds of subconscious desire and repressed memory.

Not all the artists here are experimenting with surreal fantasies and abstracted landscapes. There has been a renaissance of socially committed figurative painting, both in landscape and in portraiture, in British museums and galleries over the last decade. Nahem Shoa, who was shown in the Anomie Review, is a preeminent figure in the second category, while Jasmir Creed a pioneer of the former. Creed’s studies of urban alienation in contemporary transcultural contexts document the lived experience of South Asian men and women, as well as track the subjectivities of British life from Trafalgar Square, the centre of empire, to the slow tedium of suburbia. Unity is a wonderfully executed street-scene of a couple, perhaps recently married, and seen from behind, as they progress in their journey—together, united —past the Give Way signs and mock Tudor houses of a world both familiar and alien.

Indeed, many of the current generation of painters represented here seek to undercut, revise, reappraise, and fundamentally question the conventions of their chosen medium. By this I mean not merely their handling of paint, or the much-feted ‘return’ to the categories of figuration or abstraction that dominate the current discourse as though it is 1948, but their relationship to its foundational genres: landscape (as in the earlier cases of Banks and Cope), still life and, perhaps most of all, portraiture. The reversed portraits of Gideon Rubin are cases in point. His paintings ask an obvious question, but one which has seldom been asked by painters, with some exceptions, perhaps, in Auerbach and Bacon, amongst only a handful of other examples: what would a portrait without a face look like? What can be stripped of a sitter’s likeness and yet, against itself, seem retain some quality of their life, exuberance, and individuality? In Untitled, Rubin depicts a young auburn-haired woman from behind; we trace the stitched lines of her worn white and blue jumper and try to guess the expression which is hidden away from us. While the restless eye might always seek recognition, the greater desire is augmented in uncertainty. We are asked not what portraiture can do to depict a subject in likeness on the canvas, but how much can go undepicted and yet, against itself, retain something singular in its subject.

Lindsey Bull, whose practice also includes reversed portraits, is represented by Lilly, which depicts a fashionable young woman, resembling a fin-de-siecle aristocrat in Japonisme dress, who averts her eyes from our gaze. Bull’s command of colour and line, where each bristle of the paintbrush makes its mark in lusciously flowing movements, creates a picture of a gregarious outsider, a bohemian in control of her image.

Elsewhere, Victoria Cantons’ Maverick (The Fountain of Youth or Dreams are Made of This) [Michelangelo] reimagines perhaps the most well-known phallic rendering in all of statuary—Michaelangelo’s David—to reflect upon, as the artist puts it, ‘the largesse of youth.’ In our post-scandalized age when uninvited ‘dick pics’ proliferate on dating apps, Cantons decontextualises the penis in luxuriant golds and silvers and, in so doing, reflects less on its masculine power or agency and more on its exposed vulnerability, its sadness, its lack of power, when disaggregated from our Biblical hero’s gamely chutzpah in contrapposto. Cantons’ interest in the capacity of openness and vulnerability to reframe gendered power is also explored by Sara Berman, whose magnificent two-person show with Hannah Tilson at Cedric Bardawil was staged last autumn, and her ‘trickster archetype’. Here, in the present show, Berman shows The Fool 9. Berman, who was a successful fashion designer before focusing all her energies onto painting, reimagines herself as the harlequin—the shapeshifting, playful figure at the centre of the Italian commedia dell’arte, who appears in many of Picasso’s paintings of the rose period. Berman’s sense of this figure is coded by her definition by, and defiance of, an oppressive patriarchal society: ‘she is the victim and the scourge’, the artist reflects, coalescing improbable opposites, ‘the joke and the jokester.’

Similarly, this interest in the capacity for sartorial invention to reveal and conceal, and to express a sense of singular individuality while code-shifting in a communal way, is explored in Yulia Iosilzon’s Crossing, which depicts a figure, half-human, half-butterfly, locked in a state of biomorphic transformation. Iosilzon is part of a generation of artists who depict loosely-rendered figures, often stylishly dressed, in flowing gestures, capturing movement on the fly. Iosilzon’s paintings are fantastical yet real, extraordinary evocations of flights of fancy and yet somehow, inexplicably, about human experience: like her butterfly, we are perpetually transforming, passengers in our own bodies.

If William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’, the poem from which we have sourced the title of the exhibition, is any indicator of what is on display then it is in the capacity of painting to render the minute magnificent and the tremendous trifling: life is divine, as Blake always reminds us, and so are these paintings.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman