This exhibition finds Hoyland at maximum strength and vitality. That seems obvious: the sheer power of those large canvases, the ebullience and irresistible energy and joy of the smaller paintings, those assertive colours and marks, inscribed impetuously at the risk of wasting the fine grounds he is fashioning these days. They take one’s breath away, seen one by one. Hung together, they could seem too much of a good thing. How much vitality can we take in these days when artists’ and critics’ words, too often delivering concepts of a pretty banal sort, leave our gut responses untouched?

Being even older myself, I cannot resist pointing out that John – a big, strong man, very much what he was when I first saw his work in the Situation shows of 1960 – 1 and got to know him personally – is in his late sixties. That career of over forty years has been astounding. What is not so evident is how much his work has changed during those years. The Situation paintings were carefully constructed: tensions of a primarily linear sort, working across the canvas, delivered neatly in contrasting bands of colour. A few years later, we saw very different paintings in his unforgettable 1967 double show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery: double in the sense that, during its course, Hoyland took some paintings out in order to bring in new ones: never has a solo exhibition given me such a sense of a confident artist in full flood. These were
unusually subtle paintings, large soft but almost geometrical forms let into the canvas (as opposed to laid upon it), making space and a sort of unresolved, unobvious order. He had been working in America as well as in the UK. More periods over there followed in the 1970s, and his paintings became more solid, with paint a physical as well as visual presence and strong forms knifed and slashed onto heavily worked surfaces to invade our sensory space. He had been looking at Hans Hofmann’s work, and in 1987 he curated a memorable Hofmann exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Hofmann will always be associated with his call for exploring the ‘push-pull’ energies of clear forms and contrasting colours, and this seemed to echo Hoyland’s instinctive urge to bring maximal energies into his p ays seemed old-fashioned, even though he contravened, in a startlingly up-front way, what Modernism had taught as the essential base of progressive painting: ‘a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order’, as Maurice Denis had written in codifying the lesson of Gauguin. Situation seemed to restate that. Hoyland’s later 1960s paintings had teased the eye with flatnesses that implied space; in the 1970s, and increasingly as the years went on, he asserted painting’s right to use all the pictorial facts, including what people call illusions, that could purvey his experience of life in the studio and out of it.

It is striking how often his biographical data speak of travel. Confronting his paintings, we confront his appetite for sensual experience of many kinds, including the visual gifts of the Caribbean, India, Indonesia, especially Bali, etc. Sunshine, but also night. Dynamic movement, music, silences, curtains of plants and ountainsides, expansive planes of land and sea, sun and moon, stars, growth and rhythms, intervals.

Like the friend he has known long and greatly admires, Anthony Caro (ten years his senior), Hoyland’s work in the early 1960s appeared to posit ground rules, with their tensed flatness and total abstractness, but then went on to deny any sort of restriction. Hoyland, one of our most fertile abstract painters, in recent years has been using fairly direct references to nature, including summary figures not unlike some of Kandinsky’s. He uses such motifs assertively: individually they are highly effective marks and signs but, presented alongside others, they provide an element of narrative in his large and small paintings, and thus add to the many levels at which his work addresses us.

This is the central issue: the power and range of Hoyland’s art appears to be growing as he pulls out all the stops. We feel we are confronting the product of a headlong Action Painter, intent on letting everything happen as he obeys the instinct of a moment. That is not wholly wrong, but it has to be understood that Hoyland has always been a thoughtful, constructive painter, and he now has vast reserves of professional and human experience to draw on. His appetite seems gargantuan. ‘I would like to get to the point where I can paint anything’, he said recently to Martin Gayford, in an interview largely devoted to celebrating the ‘ferocity and voraciousness’ of Picasso’s late paintings. 1 But he emphasised also Picasso’s command, even at his wildest, of ‘the planes and the proportions and the dynamics’ of his paintings, for all their extraordinary themes and ever looser brushwork, and what Hoyland called their ‘anti-art aspect’ which makes many of them look comic, even self-mocking. What we need to be aware of is the extent that Hoyland gathers and plans. His travels are recorded, almost day by day, in series of pictorial notebooks in which he notes colours and forms and their interaction as they strike him, and these are his first steps towards particular images as well as a way of building up a visual resource answering to his spirit and his needs.

These initial images provide motifs to be explored in his large and small paintings, a vocabulary of forms that develops over time, with new motifs adopted and others dropped. Suns and moons persist; images of flight have entered – birds but perhaps also Daedalus; vertical runs and squeezes of paint that could be rising vegetation and hanging lianas; forms and motions that suggest swimming. Also the painter’s emotions: life today is not kept separate from developing that visual resource. Bryan Robertson’s death is signalled in some of his darker pictures, with grounds close to black and with elegiac forms. The outrageousness Hoyland hopes to achieve is moderated by his ineluctable sense of dynamics, which means also his structural control of each work.

If we look at the new paintings with this in mind, we find a range of highly sophisticated grounds worked onto or into linen or cotton duck, sometimes deep and withdrawing, more often shimmering and thus spatially mysterious. On these carefully worked grounds, at the right moment, he marks explosive gestural forms, each of them threatening to ruin the work he has already done. These are rehearsed as well as sudden: to some extent they come out of his extensive armoury of vital signs, as well as being developed, reinvented as he goes. But Hoyland knows better than anyone what he can do with a loaded brush, with lines of vocal colour squeezed straight from the tall plastic bottles in which his acrylics come, with paint slung from a trowel. Among his most dramatic moments are motifs brushed brusquely onto the ground and then restated, once or twice, by additional brushmarks or by these dense lines of colour, repeating the form as though to prove that these essentially spontaneous actions, whose rhetoric suggests a once-only, driven impulse, are part of him and can be restated or underlined.

The result, in every case, is a compilation of extraordinary visual strength. We cannot resist those energies. He would like us to call them outrageous, and invites comparison with Picasso’s painting and drawing against the limitations of old age. They are certainly no shrinking violets, but I see in them not only astounding vigour and optimism but also nods to the best work of other heroes of modern times, Matisse and Miro included. Titian’s maturing paintings looked outrageous to his Roman contemporaries (‘Where’s the drawing?’), but what we see now is the poetry as much as the boldness.

Norbert Lynton
1. John Hoyland on Pablo Picasso’s Seated Musketeer with Sword (1969) Daily Telegraph, 18.08.01.

The show runs at the gallery from 12 February - 5 march 2005 We're open monday-saturday, 10:30-5:30. Please pay us a visit