Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving. Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next. In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma. My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery. The proportions make for a special dynamism. But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular. Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings. They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots. The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.
It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks. But the Spot Paintings are all about painting. The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas. Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas. The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant. When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape. But the spots are random and no figure emerges. Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success. And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field. Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting. Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.
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