Tim Melville Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Paul Hartigan.
In his foreword to Don Abbott’s 2015 biography ‘Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story’, artist and writer Greg O’Brien describes Hartigan’s art as having “brightness, volatility, attitude, agitation and jouissance”, as well as “an urbanness, a dazzling, amped-up, thrashy, occasionally freaked-out exuberance, and even a little toxicity (his work straddles the Punk era, after all). At times archaic in their primal language yet futuristic in their glowing techno-finish, his works have generated different kinds of heat and light for over four decades now.”
Hartigan himself writes in his essay “Sculpted paint / Drawn in light” :
“I’ve suddenly found myself making portraits, something I thought I’d never do, but here I am (due to circumstance) in the midst of them, gold and silver faces shimmering from within an enclosure. I’m drawing with light or creating Neon Word light drawings that emanate light from within a frame, off the paper surface, upon which they are drawn. This has been a twenty year quest. It’s an achievement, the illumination is real, and no electricity is required. They don’t have plugs, they do have the Hartigan Zizz though!”
“The aspect of impediments or chosen limitations even, have always played a core role in making work. I’m thoroughly impeded now, with the cruelty and aggressiveness of MND — motor neurone disease — that being central ‘nerve death’ essentially. You’re a perfectly good car that won’t drive for some unknown, baffling reason. It’s brutal. This has flung me into seeking alternatives to normal studio practice and so like Matisse, it’s all, now, from the helm of my bed.”
“My Metallica portraits are a direct outcome of limited working circumstances, food in bags being brought to the bed by kind friends keen to help. Talking to Tim recently I’d said, “I’m essentially the same young mind I was as an eight year old boy”. Here I am still, on the edge of discovery, with artistic curiosity and plans ahead. Silver and gold were boyhood obsessions, cowboys, swords, pirates, battles and Ben Hur, all the Hollywood themes, sparkling on screen! I’m in retro mode, revisiting old favourites.”
Don Abbott has gone so far as to suggest that Hartigan has created “a new genre, a new art movement. Welcome to post-neon. These post-neon works stab at the very heart of art, asking questions and proposing hypotheses about its very nature, about why it matters, about its mysteries, and about why the artist – the true, maniacal, obsessed, infuriating, single-minded, precious, unique artist – stakes his life on it. Even when that life has an end date.”
Abbott points out that, though Hartigan has never been a painter of portraits, “the new Metallic works are faces, formed by the creases in paper bags, brought to him by friends who visit, bringing food and supplies.”
“The faces are there for all to see, and Hartigan arranges for a fellow artist to coat them with a metallic paint and frame them. They are portraits of Olympians, covered in silver and gold, heroes in their own self-defined, hermetic world. They are portraits of those who help the artist in his long hours and days of need, a generosity that is now at the core of all his relationships.”
“They are of course self-portraits too. Hartigan is sustained by memories—a disease that afflicts us all—and he remembers his boyhood fancy-dress as a pirate, his passion for the protagonists of comic book and silver screen, the promise of a future to come. In his mind he was, and always would be, a golden boy, the son of a mother who loved him unconditionally. With these metal portraits he is still golden, only confined in a glass box frame, a metaphor for the body that so chronically fails its host.”