Gary Hume

Behind the Face of the Door

I am alone in Gary Hume's studio, surrounded by his paintings. There are images everywhere: portraits, paintings of birds and animals, a flight of dozens of angels. But at this moment my gaze has settled on a blackbird sitting on a branch. The bird has a yellow beak and his head is tilted so I can see one yellow-rimmed eye. His body is blue-black against the dark, jagged foliage and the branch is the same colourless tone as the sky. Nothing is happening and the painting has a feeling of perpetual, irreducible stillness and silence. Were it not so familiar, the bird would be almost heroic. It is like a child's picture-book image, only greatly enlarged. What is it that connects this everyday image to the others here in the room, and why was this image originally chosen - why this amongst all the possible images the artist could have invented, discovered or decided to paint? But more than anything, I ask myself why this image is so strange, and what it is that makes me return to it. It is the painted bird's solitude and stillness, the colouring-book plainness, the turn of the head, the beak just open, about to give song, that draws me to it. Like certain of Hume's mask-like portraits and even those early paintings which represented closed doors, the bird on the branch is a kind of icon or surrogate for something else. It doesn't reveal anything, nor does it fix the viewer with its regard. But it knows it is being looked at, and chooses to remain.
Gary Hume mostly traces his images from photographs onto a sheet of plastic or acetate, lays the translucent sheet on the underlit bed of an epidiascope and projects the tracing onto the surface of the painting's aluminium support. He then retraces the projected line-drawing. The addition of colour is equally automatic, a matter of filling-in. His images are purged of inessentials. Until around 1997 his paintings were almost entirely constructed from flat planes and shapes. The underdrawing functioned as a contour for the mapping of these edges and planes - drawing which contains and divides. The paint itself has the same plain, declarative feel, doesn't hold brush-strokes, and dries smooth and glossy. It has a brittle, shimmering glamour. As one moves about the paintings real light and shadows smear the surface in blurry reflection. "I don't use light", Hume has said, "because that would be like painting space, so I used gloss paint to reflect light, to take real light. In my studio, which is a daylight studio, the paintings are shifting constantly". The colours Hume uses are the colours of modern urban life, the colours of cars, products and posters, colours which go in and out of fashion, colours which shine with an artificial brilliance, and will one day bleach-out and die. They are shrill and chemical, but also oddly fugitive and unnatural. They catch the vividness of the passing moment.
The line appears where the paint leaves off. In recent paintings Hume's line has become more autonomous. Drawing is now more like a cut through the surface. The ground shines through, the shine of the bare aluminium under the paint. The line is an incision. This unpainted line has a frozen quality, a feeling of energy held in suspension. Unlike a directly drawn freehand line, it has no sense of speed or attack. Its width and weight are controlled exactly, the accidental hooks and skids fixed and equalised with a kind of impassiveness, which gives even the most playful image-making a peculiar authority and gravitas. This de-personalised line, coupled with Hume's insistently flat colour, can be unnerving.
Unlike the drawn comic-book outlines in early paintings by his compatriot Patrick Caulfield, which build an illusionary space on an uninflected coloured ground, line in Hume's recent paintings does something different, and will not submit to being sculpted by the eye. In Caulfield's work, the drawing describes a conventional, usually architectural space, setting the viewer's brain to work on the indisputable flatness of the coloured ground, which one involuntarily folds into three dimensions. The artist sets up familiar cues, so that one knows how to read the image without having to think about it. This is Caulfield's 'transparency', and the transparency within many paintings of David Salle (which only recomplicated Francis Picabia's poetic device), as well as the transparency of the paintings and wall drawings of Michael Craig-Martin. Instead, you shuttle back and forth across the surface of Hume's paintings, making and unmaking form. Perhaps the illusion of space is unavoidable, and has something to do with the ways our brains are wired. We divide the world into figure and ground, presence and absence. In the recent Song paintings, this becomes difficult. If any of Hume's paintings get beneath the surface of things, it is these. The Song paintings are a little like a section through a torso, showing spine and ribcage, or a view of flesh and bone in the larynx, for example, though this is all handled with such undivided attention to the autonomy of interpenetrating shapes that the configuration sometimes loses its grip on the model that inspired it.
A few winters ago Hume and a friend built a snowman on a hill in the Peak District, in the north of England. They coloured the snow with food dye and took photographs of it. The snowman ended up as a painting, Snowman, 1996, the object reduced to a small tan coloured circle resting on a larger red circle, set against a cold blue and grey background. Without the title, one would barely be aware of what the painting represents, and certainly not the building of the actual coloured snowman that led up to it. But the painting is more than a wistful and poetic reminder of a day's lark in the cold, although in a sense it is a souvenir. What is particularly interesting about the painting is that once one has read the title the painting becomes the snowman, and it is difficult to read it any other way.
Looking at Hume's paintings, I sometimes experience a kind of deja vu: suddenly I'm back in the 1960s, in a world of second generation post-painterly abstractionists. Then in a children's nursery, hung with mobiles and colouring book animals. But does a painting like Polar Bear, 1994, belong in a nursery? This opened-out, green, teddy-bear shape isn't as benign as it looks. Nor are the animals in the Garden Paintings, 1996, whose images are drawn from a group of fifteenth century French tapestries, La Dame a la licorne. Hume has kept remarkably close to the original, yet the paintings are anything but a mechanical or anonymous transposition. The animals are disquieting. They seem to be waiting, and watching. Hume's Snowman is like this too, and if we think of it as a portrait, then we have found ourselves standing behind the figure, looking for a face that we will never see.
What remains is a strangeness, a sense of things frozen and suspended in the painting's silence: an owl sitting on a branch, a rabbit munching a leaf, a closed door, bare feet on black grass, a face. Hume's paintings sometimes allude to feelings - Scared, Begging For It, Fear, Poor Thing - but they don't explain those feelings, nor do they illustrate them. Hume's paintings present us with arrested images.
For a long time, Hume only painted doors - life-sized, one colour paintings whose proportions and details were measured directly from real institutional doors - which were painted just as real doors are painted, in slick, shiny household gloss paint. The door, the artist said, "looked like a face, which I liked straight away, and it also looked like perfect modernism". Hume's Door Paintings performed a neat coalescence of the painted image and the things they represented. The paintings resembled doors but were not doors, and like Hume's Snowman, we were on the wrong side of them. These were the kinds of doors one finds in hospitals, opening onto an operating theatre or to a morgue, or perhaps on to a vast mass-catering kitchen. Whatever you imagined lay on the other side, even if it was some kind of institutionalised heaven, the paintings left you feeling that you didn't want to go there. The faces one discerned in their internal configuration of low-relief details, the round windows and recessed panels, were a constant reminder of the difference between the painted and the real.
The Door Paintings recall a work by Sigmar Polke called Schrank, painted in 1963. Schrank, with its central, Newmanesque vertical zip and funny little keyholes to either side, more resembled the doors to a cupboard than the door to an institutional room or to the outside world. Schrank is a painting which has me fumbling in my pockets for a key each time I look at a reproduction of it, whereas Hume's doors have precisely the opposite effect. Curiosity about what lies on the other side of the door is tempered by the certainty that behind the painted door there is only a wall. Is it possible to think of a door and not think about where it leads to? The door was closed, and looked, too, like yet another figuration of modernism's closure, even painting's closure. The first Door Paintings were painted with that ubiquitous magnolia off-white that finds its way throughout modern interiors, but the colour soon shifted register, and became bright, luscious, sensual and complex. Where one might have expected inert arrangements of bureaucratic creams and browns, or dead greens and scuffed blacks which are such a daily insult to pleasure, there were pinks and golden tans, and paintings in which the panels and roundels, the hand and foot-plates of the doors were picked-out garishly, or like exercises from Joseph Albers, or in approximation of the close-toned paintings of Ad Reinhard. Like Picabia's early watercolour, Radio-Concerts, 1922, with its symmetrical arrangement of geometric forms, loosely resembling the dials and knobs on an early radio set, Hume's paintings had a disquieting, robotic anthropomorphism which their artificial brightness did nothing to disguise.
Hume abandoned the door paintings in 1993. He even titled one painting after his disenchantment, calling it More Fucking Values, to suggest that all he was doing, from painting to painting, was to shuffle a set of formal values and possibilities over and over again. This was not a 'perfect modernism', but slavery. Behind the imperturbable blankness of the door lay a waiting-room, a room full of people waiting to get out: minor tabloid celebrity Patsy Kensit, with a sticky pink face and green lips, sucking her thumb; radio disc-jockey Tony Blackburn, who spilled his sadness out on-air; a man whistling in the dark, and a whole crowd of impossibly muscled figures. (These were derived from statues for a stadium in Rome designed during Italy's Fascist period.) In the painting Jealousy and Passion, 1993, one of these bulky, awkward beings has a lipsticked female smile stuck on his face - the same smile that Willem de Kooning snipped from a Camel cigarette ad in 1949, and glued to his Study for Woman in 1950. Instead of de Kooning's hysterical woman, Hume's figure is a muscle-bound yellow silhouette, wearing only that transvestite smile.
The shift which occurred in Hume's painting in 1993 came as a shock. The artist had abandoned the one concept which had sustained him. "My art education was based upon the notion of having an idea and then being able to act on it and make something concrete... I searched for another idea and found I had no ideas... It was terrible... So I asked myself what is it I want? I wanted air in my lungs and I wanted a sense of roots."
Hume's response to this crisis was to make a number of improvised sculptures in his studio, using his young son's playroom slide, plastic dolls, rubbish bags, adhesive tape and plastic tubing. It was all, he told me at the time, about birth. It was more about rebirth, an adult's return to messy, infantile play. Hume had a video made of himself sitting, fully clothed, in an old zinc bathtub in the yard behind his studio. In his comedic home video Me as King Cnut, Hume sits in the bath, smoking and wearing a Burger King paper crown on his head. Me As King Cnut is, of course, the artist as King Cunt. Like the ribald play-acting of Gilbert & George ('George the Shit and Gilbert the Cunt'), it was an aggressively banal and self-denigrating piece of theatre. If the artist had to appear at all, he had to appear as a parody of himself.
'What to paint?' remains a question and further, 'What is fit to paint?' Asked whether he regards himself as a figurative artist, Hume has said "I do flora, fauna and portraiture". It's true: Hume paints flowers, animals and people. He paints living things, or things which look as though they might be alive, but aren't really. His models include the concrete angels suspended from the ceiling in Oscar Niemeyer's cathedral in Brasilia, a bird on a branch in a picture book, the bestiary in a tapestry. He paints the people he knows and images of people whose faces he has seen only in photographs and in paintings. Me has worked from Holbein and from the obituary photograph of the dead comedian Peter Cook. Hume has said that he is an artist without ideas. (Not having ideas is, of course, Itself an idea.) He painted a Madonna in 1993 "because she has been painted so beautifully". Because she has been paint-td so beautifully: this was the test. What could Hume do with the subject, avoiding sentimentality, avoiding a pastiche of all the paintings of the Madonna, avoiding invidious comparison? Home's Madonna is disconcertingly featureless, as plain as the surface of one of his doors. Her head is an irregular black ovoid painted in high-gloss household paint, as is the head of the infant Jesus whom she cradles. The Madonna's hair flows through the painting in ropes of white. Hume liked the idea that viewers of the painting could see their own dim reflections in the faces of Mary and baby Jesus. Later, Hume went on to paint a portrait, copied from a newspaper photograph, of 1 little deaf boy; an otherwise ordinary boy in a striped blue shirt leaning forward into the frame. Hume painted the anonymous child surrounded by a halo, and called the painting Messiah, 1998. Hume says he hates stories in paintings, but the possibility of narrative is there nonetheless. What we get instead is a painted situation, something stilled at a particular moment, something enigmatic and inexplicable, something as fleeting as a look, endlessly arrested.
After Vermeer, 1995, takes the Portrait of a Young Woman, 1866-67, by Vermeer, reverses her and repaints her in orange, leaving her mouth and eyes, her ear and earring white, Vermeer's portrait depicts a sitter who appears to be turning as though to welcome our arrival, at the very moment that we come to her. She engages our complicity in looking and being looked at with a painted suddenness. When Hume painted supermodel Kate Moss he left her face unpainted, sanded it down to the bare shiny aluminium of the painting's support. A temporary, faceless Venus, she is a collection of positive and negative shapes. She's there and she's not there, in her bikini, posing her supermodel pose, with a little collaged-on curlicue, I delicate paper wave, lapping beneath her. Kate, 1996, recalls I Matisse cut-out. Not only is there an actual collaged element, put the rest of the painting's hard-edged shapes have the kind of angularity associated with the sheared arcs and slices made by scissors. This in itself is typical: Hume's outline describes and isolates forms, or parts of forms, rather than bringing them together. He maps the surface, the topography, and colours-in areas just as one would colour a map. The solidity of form and mass has been replaced by a topographical perspective, what Hume calls a "God's eye view". You feel you could reach out and peel off a painted flower, or an ear, or an lye, and hold it up between finger and thumb, where it would have no more substance and thickness than the layer of paint Ills made from.
Hume's portrait of Francis Bacon, Francis, 1997, looks as if Bacon is wearing an orange ski-mask, or a terrorist's balaclava, or as if he had spent rather too long on a sun bed. Hume painted Bacon with a few mad hairs springing from his head and tiny teeth bared between thin red lips, as a somewhat alarming but humorous cypher, as if to debunk Bacon's ghostly presence as a kind of Brando-esque Godfather to current British art. Or rather, to prick the overly reverential attitude which surrounds Bacon's reputation, while at the same time looking over his shoulder to him, just as Bacon looked back at, and painted, the death mask of William Blake.
Often, Hume's portraits are reduced to an instantaneous look or glance - he freezes that sudden apprehension of a pair of eyes, hair, that blob on a stalk for a head on a neck. Hume's portraits are often about such fleeting moments of recognition, yet the more one looks the more complex these paintings become. They are portraits painted in the subject's absence, representing not so much the person as the space that their body would occupy, the trace of a portrait, a barely fleshed-out shadow. Hume's Tired, 1997, is just such a trace, an outline as poignant as an empty bottle. Jasper Johns did something like this too, when he put his outlined figure in his paintings of the Seasons, 1985-86, quoting Picasso's earlier insertion of his shadow in the painting The Studio, 1928-29.
A new series of very large paintings, which Hume is in the process of completing as I write, have been given the generic title Water. The paintings depict fragments of female bodies simply delineated, their outline comprised of heads, breasts, eyes, arms and hands. The figure is endlessly returning to the plane on which it is painted, but never returning to the same place twice. These women are there and they are not there: they slip away and then return. I follow the line which describes them and divides them from themselves, the line which draws and redraws their contours across the painting, which describes too many breasts, a nipple half obscuring a second nipple, too many heads or the same head too many times. One is bound to think of Picabia, and his transparent overlaid images, but his was a more disruptive simultaneity, which played on our inability to read two things at once. Picabia's paintings depended on a notion of a consistent pictorial space which was itself transparent, whereas Hume's fragmented figures are always in the same plane, compressed into the surface of the painting. Everything is surface, and my reflection is in there with it as I move around, putting me in the picture along with the daylight and the shadows in the room where the painting hangs. The painting doesn't depict movement, but makes me aware of my own mobile eye, my own body in front of the painting. Hume plays games with our desire to see and be seen, to look and be looked at.
The painter's subjects live on the surface. If they have an inner life, a life beyond the painting, it is unknowable. They are floating between us and something unknown. Limpid, fragmentary and weightless, their elusive presences aren't so much watery refractions as the delineations of multiple tracings, repeated glances and endless touches. The drawing dances and drifts, turns on itself, like a thought turned over in the mind, an image recalled for the pleasure of remembering it. These are paintings of great intimacy and strangeness; they pleasure the imagination, as much by what is left out or withheld as by what is described. We invent their fullness, both as forms and as beings. In these paintings the surface has become a screen on which the mind projects its own memories of bodies, its own erotics. Looking at them, these paintings make me feel weightless, as though 1 were only an eye adrift, floating in an imaginary, intangible mental space.
When I think of Gary Hume painting, I think of his shadow in his daylight studio, crossing and recrossing the painting, along with all the reflections and slicks of light blooming and glaring on the surface. I think of him losing and re-finding himself in the surface, along with the line he is painting. I also think of him drawing-up the picture, at night, moving around between the projector and the painting. His shadow is cast onto the painting, and the projected image is also cast on him. The artist is a screen on which the world is projected, and the painting is another screen, on which the artist projects the world. I wonder why he does not paint himself. But of course he does. He paints himself dissolving in images, losing himself in the painting's surface, finding himself in the things he paints. He is there in the anonymity of the surface, in the strange moments he depicts.

Adrian Searle is art critic of The Guardian

First published in Searle, Adrian and David Batchelor. Gary Hume. XLVIII Venice Biennale, The British Council, London 1999

More on Gary Hume

	Related Texts
CV
Bibliography
Text by Anne Prenzler
Gary Hume in conversation with David Barrett

	Related Links
http://www.imma.ie/en/page_... Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
http://www.matthewmarks.com... Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online

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