- Venue
- Blain Southern
- Location
If you saw this exhibition without knowing the names Damien Hirst or Felix Gonzales-Torres, it would read quite differently to the provenance they bring to any gallery. Shown together, Gonzales-Torres’ installation and Hirst’s paintings are all to do with Candy, or sweeties to you and me.
Hirst’s paintings can be taken in with a quick sweep of the eye. Throughout the gallery, the same blobby candy colours appear in different sizes, the forms crammed together without spaces. The Visual Candy series were made in the ‘90’s, as a double bluff response to an art critic so describing his spot paintings. I’m trying to read them and look at them without knowing that, trying to see what there is in the paintings themselves, whether I spontaneously get the “stylised depiction of the psychological effects of happy, mood-enhancing drugs” explained by the exhibition writing. Hirst speaks of the “horror underlying everything”.
I admit I don’t really see that. The live impression of the paintings is for me the differences between the qualities of paint used for different colours, why some are clear and light, while others lack depth and are more surface. Maybe these are not all sweeties after all. There is definitely something else underlying everything, perhaps more layers of artifice and sublimation. These are double negative bluff paintings, and I forgot the question.
Gonzales-Torres untitled piles of candies from 1992 are interactive, ever-changing multiple sculptures which reform as they are rearranged, signifying so many concepts of the individual, the collective, and acknowledging the transitory nature of even the most permanent. So far so lovely. The Blain Southern Gallery is quite a vast space, making the unlimited supply appear very limited indeed. Such a work should surely be reimagined in the light of other recent projects, not recreated verbatim. Participation is supposedly encouraged, but it all looked so careful that my slight shuffling at the edges was actually frowned upon in the gallery! If I was showing this work, I would have filled half the gallery floor to ceiling, so that it really had impact. I would employ art students to muck about with it all day. From the long window space outside, the work is sadly let-down by looking like a half hearted shop display.
