Us and them, then and now, concrete and jungle, acceptance and rejection … Birmingham and Jamaica. Hurvin Anderson’s world is defined by clashing contrasts, by conflicts that can’t ever be resolved.
The British artist’s washed out, hazy, heat-drenched take on figurative painting is him trying to figure it all out, to make sense of a senseless world. That he doesn’t manage to – that you leave this big, affecting and often very beautiful retrospective at Tate Britain with more questions than answers – doesn’t mean he’s failed. The opposite, actually.
Back in 1990s Birmingham, where he grew up, Anderson started painting from photos – family snapshots, images found in dusty boxes. A woman in a patterned dress seems to melt into the wallpaper behind her. Figures walking down plane steps are slowly turning into ghosts. His adult sister sits next to herself as a child.
A photograph may promise some kind of nostalgic truth, but then Anderson paints it and it all collapses. Geographic distance, past and present, all of it becomes intangible.
That’s because Anderson – a black British man of Caribbean heritage – is trying to process so many ideas of belonging and history at once. A huge painting of his sister and niece on a frozen lake in Canada leaves their faces totally featureless. They’re there, but they don’t belong. He paints his local Wyndley swimming pool in Brum as some kind of modernist fever dream, but from a distance, like it’s not for him.
Then he paints an apple tree superimposed on a mango tree, imagining his brother scrumping in England for one and the Caribbean for the other. Identity is a fragile thing here, so easily torn.
The only time that conflict stops is in the barbershop. This is a sanctified place; a place where black people can belong without rejection. He paints it empty, serene and church-like – then he paints it occupied, clients’ faces repeated in a hall of mirrors, the walls covered in photos of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. One solo portrait shows a man alone in a barber’s chair, facing away, his head bowed seemingly in prayer.
Anderson abandons the grim, grey, sludgy misery of England at this point in favour of the lush, humid, tropical beauty of the Caribbean. But things feel no less oppressive.
In the early 2000s, he went to Trinidad and Tobago and saw iron security grilles in front of shops, chain link fences around private compounds. Not only did they frame the views, but they kept you out. It’s us and them again, but made physical. He paints country clubs behind fences, hotels being reclaimed by the jungle. Everything again feels like it’s collapsing.
The same themes and ideas, even the same images, get rehashed and reworked over and over. The same barbershop scene, recomposed various times with new elements, the same red security grille framing different views, the same woman against the same wallpaper. You go through the rooms thinking: hold on, didn’t I just see that? You did, but not quite. It’s like stumbling through someone else’s memories.
Because that’s exactly what’s happening. He repaints these scenes, not because the memories change but because he changes. You won’t always think the same way about your childhood leisure centre or local library as you age. So Anderson keeps reprocessing.
But, unlike Peter Doig (also a serious painter of memory and the Caribbean), this isn’t a purely emotional attempt to deal with the past; it’s a deeply political one, too. The Jamaican hotels Anderson paints were built for white guests, in a country founded on slavery and colonial exploitation. He paints black spaces populated with black figures, he paints white spaces being swallowed up by the jungle, he paints roads and fences and paths splitting a black country in half, he paints colonial history reimposing itself on the post-colonial present.
The paintings are haunted by slavery, colonialism and clashing identities because he’s haunted by those things, because the Caribbean is haunted by them, and so is Britain.
But, crucially, it’s also absolutely beautiful painting. Anderson combines geometric, modernist blockiness with washes of dripping, gestural colour, and smashes free-hand figuration into minimalist grids. Stand in the second-to-last room between the five different paintings of the same concrete staircase in a constantly mutating jungle and you’ll lose yourself in the marks, the colours, the bright blues and throbbing purples and deep greens. It’s amazing.
And it’s all anchored by an unresolved sense of conflict. But who needs resolution when the painting is this good?
At Tate Britain, London, from 26 March to 23 August.
Source:
www.theguardian.com
