ad infinitum

Damien Hirst. Hypothalamus Acetone Powder. Household gloss on canvas.

I really can’t believe I’m writing about Damien Hirst again. A year or two ago, I didn’t even like Damien Hirst. And I’m writing about the spot paintings, of all things. What can there possibly be to say about the spot paintings?

That in them, Hirst takes visual art to the place of pure math. Each painting generated by the same parameters, the same formula. Each with slight variations on the theme: so many permutations and combinations. So much measurement, so much perfection. 

And yet they’re not static. The colours don’t stay where they are placed. They push and they pull. They pulse like irregular heartbeats, keeping the irregular tempo of our irregular lives. They throb. They become music; notes freed from the staff lines, floating on the blank white page.

They are the measured beats of poetry. They scan like a poem, in iambic pentameter maybe. Or some other longer, more random rhythmic construction, as yet unnamed. They are the structure of a free verse poem without the words. Without the meanings. Without the voice.

Ad infinitum.

Damien Hirst. Methoxyverapamil. 1991. Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst. One of the spot paintings. Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst. Untitled (Nick, Margot, Chris, India). 1999.
Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst, spot painting.

Damien Hirst - Even Better Than the Real Thing

Music  by U2. Video (behind the band) by Damien Hirst. 

Burning butterflies.

The fate of witches and martyrs. Rebirth followed by second death. Salvation followed by immolation. Heaven followed by hell.

Or the final liberation: body released from form into light. Into energy. Into spirit. Whole again on the other side of the fire.

Even better than the real thing?

Damien Hirst - Mandalas and Stained Glass Windows

Damien Hirst. I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds. 2006 (17 feet long)
All photos are from the Damien Hirst website:
www.damienhirst.com.

Butterflies -- themselves images of transcendence, bodies broken and recreated, re-imagined with the most fragile of wings, released from gravity. Here combined in forms designed by those of us still-earthbound in order to contemplate the skies.

Damien Hirst. I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006. Detail.

Damien Hirst. Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven, 2007.

Damien Hirst, Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven, 2007. Detail.

Damien Hirst. Sympathy in White Major: Absolution II. 2006

Damien Hirst. Sympathy in White Major: Absolution II. 2006. Detail.

Damien Hirst. Eternity. 2002 to 2004.
(This was not at the Tate Modern exhibit.)

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love, 1991 - Photo by Caroline Claisse 

You wander into a room. There are canvases on all of the walls, each painted with a single bright, glossy color; each with a number of butterfly specimens firmly affixed. In the central space, ashes. The remains of numerous packets of cigarettes.

Damien Hirst - In and Out of Love (detail) - Photo by Hettie O'Brien

You move through this room and -- passing through a veil -- into the next room. You are again met by butterflies. This time, they are living ones. Having been affixed to canvases as chrysalises, they have (some time ago) emerged as winged creatures, dripping a blood-like fluid down the blank canvases of their rebirths. Paintings made with their bodies. Butterfly calligraphy, written in the language of flight.

Damien Hirst. In and Out of Love. Photo: Google Credits.

Damien Hirst. In and Out of Love. Photo by Caroline Claisse.

In one room, the stasis of death; bodies like memories. In the other, all the chaos and the messiness and movement of life being lived. In one room absence, in the other  presence. In one room the past, in the other a vital presentness.

The work is Damien Hirst's In and Out of Love.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God, platinum, diamond, human teeth, 2007

I was fortunate enough to be able to see the Damien Hirst exhibit at the Tate Modern in London this summer. The following posts are about pieces of his work as I experienced it there. (Sadly, I did not get to see For the Love of God, pictured above.)

"In (Damien) Hirst's work, truth resides not in absolutes, but in dualities and in the continual push and pull between them: 'Life and death are the biggest polar opposites there are. I like love and I like hate ... I like all those opposites. On and off. Happy and sad. In an artwork, I always try to say something and deny it at the same time.'"

-- Anne Gallagher, from the curatorial text accompanying the Damien Hirst  retrospective at the Tate Modern, 2012