Lot Essay
Howard Hodgkin's paintings are unique in contemporary art for the use of a pictorial language that challenges the limits of representation and abstraction. Like Proust in his monumental novel, La Recherche du Temps Perdue (Remembrance of Things Past), Hodgkin's paintings usually seek to recapture a moment of lost or fleeting time--a glance across a room, an impression of a florid sunset in an exotic locale, the sound of a voice heard but words not remembered.
Hodgkin uses his well-wrought and finely-tuned pictorial language to evoke the feelings such recollections awakesin us. 'All Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as the grit of some experience pearled by reflection. They begin where words fail, evocations of mood and sensation more than visual records, but descriptions indubitably of the physical as well as the emotional reality' (J. McEwen, "Introduction" in Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, London 1984, p. 10).
Like Proust again, Hodgkin recreates that fleeting moment over a period of months or even years, as one can see by the dates of his paintings. Just as Proust's sentence structures reveal a complex associative grasp of the reality of a remembered instant, Hodgkin's works are not created in a moment, but rather are allowed to develop over time, to gain the richness and complexity of surface and gesture that alludes to the recollection of a moment caught in the complexity of time. They are not so much reflections on an external landscape as windows opening onto an internal landscape of the mind.
Beyond the metaphorical subjects of his painting, Hodgkin takes 'immense pleasure in the nature of oil paint, in the codes and conventions of pictorial gesture, in the blatant unreality of art. In the Bay of Naples (1980-82) is a tremendously sensual painting, almost a bravura demonstration of the things that the painter can make paint do: dots and blobs of red and blue and green paint bob and twinkle on a dark ground, like lights seen out at sea; a vertical bar of pink and blue paint evokes something quite different, more architectural, more solid; a liquid, serpentine swathe of turqouise and dark blue and green paint at the painting's centre, summarily applied in a few strokes of the brush, is a wave transmuted, boldly, simply, into one of Hodgkin's many pictorial signs for water. This is not so much a landscape painting as a landscape of paint, a world of pleasure to be entered into. A painting can be, not just the world transfigured, but another world altogether. An instant elsewhere' (A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 101).
Hodgkin uses his well-wrought and finely-tuned pictorial language to evoke the feelings such recollections awakesin us. 'All Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as the grit of some experience pearled by reflection. They begin where words fail, evocations of mood and sensation more than visual records, but descriptions indubitably of the physical as well as the emotional reality' (J. McEwen, "Introduction" in Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, London 1984, p. 10).
Like Proust again, Hodgkin recreates that fleeting moment over a period of months or even years, as one can see by the dates of his paintings. Just as Proust's sentence structures reveal a complex associative grasp of the reality of a remembered instant, Hodgkin's works are not created in a moment, but rather are allowed to develop over time, to gain the richness and complexity of surface and gesture that alludes to the recollection of a moment caught in the complexity of time. They are not so much reflections on an external landscape as windows opening onto an internal landscape of the mind.
Beyond the metaphorical subjects of his painting, Hodgkin takes 'immense pleasure in the nature of oil paint, in the codes and conventions of pictorial gesture, in the blatant unreality of art. In the Bay of Naples (1980-82) is a tremendously sensual painting, almost a bravura demonstration of the things that the painter can make paint do: dots and blobs of red and blue and green paint bob and twinkle on a dark ground, like lights seen out at sea; a vertical bar of pink and blue paint evokes something quite different, more architectural, more solid; a liquid, serpentine swathe of turqouise and dark blue and green paint at the painting's centre, summarily applied in a few strokes of the brush, is a wave transmuted, boldly, simply, into one of Hodgkin's many pictorial signs for water. This is not so much a landscape painting as a landscape of paint, a world of pleasure to be entered into. A painting can be, not just the world transfigured, but another world altogether. An instant elsewhere' (A. Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 101).