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chelsea fringe

Does faith build a better city?

Come and play.

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200words: Richard Hamilton

I arrived at an unexpected exhibition: where was the banality of pop mish mash I had braced my senses to endure? Instead, displayed was a man's palpable curiosity fascinated with the emergent geometry of organic form: bones, bubbles, cells, scales, the Milky Way! This inquisitive flutter of formal delight, however, thinned to a sparsity, being planed to a veneer of surface and simulacra, before being finally extinguished in a vortex of self-reference and confused language games.

“..an art of affirmatory intention is not uncritical,”

Hamilton, (Urbane Image) 

Tormented by his own genius is the sense I receive of Hamilton's spirit, restlessly and formidably talented, he taunts us by the many raw technical prowesses he is able to turn his hand to.  Disappointed by the limits of a D'Arcy Thompson explanation of the world, he seems satisfied with a career producing vengefully inorganic work, angry ugly paintings, brazenly adolescent with scatalogical flourishes, flippantly ebullient yet adrift, knowingly rebellious yet naively compliant fuel to the fire of a rapacious and capitalist image culture.

Hommage à Chrysler Corp snippets exactly that voluptuousness which makes my kettle so desirable. Trainsition III's turbo pointilism sees ever more minute and detached fragments eviscerated by their speed of communication. Five Tyres Remoulded and various Interior's make a fetish of perspective, (literal perspectivism, if you will) elevating technique in an art about art, a medium turned in on itself. And by this process, his collages throughout scream in their sad and desperate scrambling for an alternative to Growth and Form. Finally, fatigued by his own irony, he is left lonely with naked wraiths to hoover up the end of an art that is vacuous, violent and self-pitious.

tate.org.uk