CLYDE HOPKINS - Paintings 2000 - 2017, 15th November - 12th December, Private View 14th November, 6 - 8pm, BLOND CONTEMPORARY, 7 Piccadilly Arcade, SW1Y 6NH.
“… (the paintings are) tough and put together with a cool lightness of hand which conceals the lucid pictorial intelligence which has gone into their making.”
This new body of paintings combines aerial landscapes and floating shapes - figuration, colour-fields, texture and abstraction. ‘Kites' are seen from above - painted with brush, roller and airbrush. They are textured and evidence process and changes in direction through overlapping layers. They show clean, machine-like fades and colour blocks that overwrite thoughts, mistakes and past potential futures.
When we talked about his current position relative to his painting, his reference to a previous Stuart Cumberland as the author of the work suggested that there might be rich parallels to be drawn between working with Cumberland’s painting, working with an artist’s estate and questions of authorship around painting and post-conceptual painting in particular.
In Rogues gallery each artist is asked to create their avatar, their alter ego who will travel in their place in cyberspace – their future artist for the metaverse. Perhaps the shape that takes will look a lot like their real-life persona - content and confident as they are. Or perhaps it will be entirely different and with an agenda of its own.
