We live in troubling times. Chaos abounds at home, abroad there is war and repression. Some artists choose to comment on the strife and struggle they observe around them, others choose to find meaning in intimacy. In 1943, when Nazi jackboots strutted down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, both Bonnard and Matisse, whose studios were only a few kilometres away, elected to lift their heads beyond the daily horror of the Occupation; instead they were hard at work on a series of paintings of domestic subjects: garden scenes, still life arrangements and figure studies, explorations of glorious colour harmonies that exude a robust optimism in the face of danger and despair, paintings which express a full-blooded sense of existence through the transforming power of colour and light.
Although I started out as a sort of social commentator in paint 30 years ago (David Messum once promoted me as a 'modern day Hogarth, in the style of Sickert') my painter’s journey has taken me, via the expressive language of French Post-Impressionism, into the rich pastures of English Romanticism. In a world where satire and irony tend to predominate, I intend my work to stand as a passionate defence of beauty and domestic harmony, as a symbol of hope and promise. The collection of paintings in this exhibition, all made over the last
couple of years, share in a common quest to conjure the lyrical and the dreamlike, to present an inner world at peace with itself. To achieve this, I have tended to work away from the subject, allowing memory and reflection to seep into the process, so that each picture is a distillation of experience, a reinvention of my imagination, rather than a straight record of a place or an arrangement of objects. By restricting the colours in my palettes to only one or two primaries and one or two secondaries, have been able to better explore colour harmony, which seems to me to work in a similar way to the keys in music, where the greatest expressiveness is achieved within a restricted hierarchy of notes.
The pictures in this catalogue are largely inspired by my home and garden, and by two much loved areas of the countryside: the wild, romantic shoreline of the Cornish coast, and the deep sultriness of the Midi. But all the paintings here, the figure subjects, the interiors and the landscapes, have at their heart the principal intention to deploy the abstract elements of picture making – the arrangements of shape, colour, line, pattern, and the sense of light achieved through variation in tonal values – in the pursuit of exploring timelessness, of connecting us to time past, present and future, to both the visible world and the invisible.
Hugo Grenville, Dorset 2023Paintings are for sale on receipt of this catalogue
The entire exhibition can be viewed online at www.cricketfineart.co.uk
One Man Shows
1991 New King’s Road Gallery
1992 The Newbury Museum: Featured Artist of Newbury Festival
1992 Smith’s Gallery, London
1994 Oliver Swann Gallery, London
1995 Oliver Swann Gallery, London
1995 China Club, Hong Kong
1997 Messum’s, London
1999 Messum’s, London
2000 Messum’s, London
2001 Messum’s, London
2002 Messum’s, London
2003 Messum’s, London
2005 Messum’s, London
2006 Findlay Galleries, New York
2007 Josie Eastwood Fine Art, London
2009 Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach
2010 Cricket Fine Art, London
2011 Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach
2013 Findlay Galleries, New York
2016 Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach
2016 Studio 2000, Domburg, Holland
2017 Findlay Galleries, New York
2020 Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach
2021 Findlay Galleries, New York
Group Shows
During the past 25 years Hugo Grenville has exhibited at the Salon (Societe des Artistes Française) in Paris, and at the Threadneedle Prize in London, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, the Royal Society of Painters in Oil, The Chelsea Arts Club.
Grenville has recently exhibited alongside works by Cezanne, Degas and Renoir in New York at the Nassau Museum of Art, USA
