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Lot Essay
Caulfield's work changed direction in the early 1980s, possibly as a result of the opportunity of seeing a large body of his work at the 1981 retrospective held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Tate Gallery, London. He had already used photo realist techniques in earlier works including After Lunch, 1975 (Tate Britain), but it was during the early 1980s that he combined many different styles of painting into his work and dispensed with his trademark black outlines and flat planes of colour (see lot 125).
An ambiguity in the distinction between interior and exterior space, together with the use of strong shadows, had been a major feature of Caulfield's work of the 1970s, and these elements now came to the forefront of his paintings, as demonstrated in Fish and Sandwich, 1984. Although the painting clearly depicts a whole fish on one plate and a sandwich sitting on a smaller plate nearby, the space within the work seems complex and hard to read. The plates do not appear to be sitting on a table, and the brighter areas through the columns appear as if there is a strong light source, particularly with the blue shadows. However, the central column casts no shadow and the space seems uncertain and mysterious.
Marco Livingstone comments, 'To what forces can one ascribe these salient aspects of Caulfield's work of the mid-1980s? Perhaps it was simply the artist's desire to renew or reinterpret his language that led him to venture further into the direction of mood, psychology and the vagaries of visual perception. At the risk of indelicacy or, worse, of cod psychologising, I would venture another possibility: that the breakdown of his first marriage in the 1980s, when his three boys were all still very young, may have induced in him feelings of uncertainty that found form in his art naturally as a consequence of his intuitive way of working. Fish and Sandwich, 1984 features, perhaps tellingly, a solitary creature stranded (like a fish out of water?) on a plate; the carved columns and arches of the serving table on which these items rest, and the patterns of shadows they cast, recall the architectural arcades of Giorgio de Chirico's (1888-1978) metaphysical paintings of around 1920, which reflect on the isolation and melancholy aloneness of the individual within the vastness of the world' (loc. cit.).
An ambiguity in the distinction between interior and exterior space, together with the use of strong shadows, had been a major feature of Caulfield's work of the 1970s, and these elements now came to the forefront of his paintings, as demonstrated in Fish and Sandwich, 1984. Although the painting clearly depicts a whole fish on one plate and a sandwich sitting on a smaller plate nearby, the space within the work seems complex and hard to read. The plates do not appear to be sitting on a table, and the brighter areas through the columns appear as if there is a strong light source, particularly with the blue shadows. However, the central column casts no shadow and the space seems uncertain and mysterious.
Marco Livingstone comments, 'To what forces can one ascribe these salient aspects of Caulfield's work of the mid-1980s? Perhaps it was simply the artist's desire to renew or reinterpret his language that led him to venture further into the direction of mood, psychology and the vagaries of visual perception. At the risk of indelicacy or, worse, of cod psychologising, I would venture another possibility: that the breakdown of his first marriage in the 1980s, when his three boys were all still very young, may have induced in him feelings of uncertainty that found form in his art naturally as a consequence of his intuitive way of working. Fish and Sandwich, 1984 features, perhaps tellingly, a solitary creature stranded (like a fish out of water?) on a plate; the carved columns and arches of the serving table on which these items rest, and the patterns of shadows they cast, recall the architectural arcades of Giorgio de Chirico's (1888-1978) metaphysical paintings of around 1920, which reflect on the isolation and melancholy aloneness of the individual within the vastness of the world' (loc. cit.).