Jeremy Annear 2016 by Messums

JEREMY ANNEAR

1. E arth R h y th m I V, 2 016

oil on canvas 100 x 70 cms 393⁄8 x 271⁄2 ins

JEREMY ANNEAR

N E W WORKS 2016 tex t by

Andrew Lambir th

www.messums.com

J e r e my A n n e a r

With this exhibition Jeremy Annear celebrates 20 years with Messumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and it is appropriate that he should have produced such a luminous and beautiful body of new work to mark the occasion. He has worked intensively since the beginning of the year in a bout of sustained creativity, and admits that this has been for him a particularly important and fruitful season.

His trademark pale surfaces, built up with a palette knife over a dark ground, are not so evident in these new paintings. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as if we are going back to an earlier archaeological strata before the top layers of lighter pigment have been added; an earlier time. These new pictures tend to have darker grounds, richer and more vibrant colour harmonies.

Objects in Sky Blue Space, 1999 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cms

Painting for Annear is a process of discovery through making, a negotiation with the world that is also a spiritual rite of passage. The act of painting is instinctive rather than long pondered, but he approaches his daily stint in the studio in a highly professional manner, focusing his inner resources on a state of being that is dispassionate, disciplined and truthful. Yet he prefers to wear his gift lightly, and does not offer sermons but celebrations. In his scintillating pictures a Modernist interpretation of life in Cornwall (ancient landscape meets everyday objects and activities) is played out through a dialogue between the geometric and the handdrawn. The organic element is strong: perfection is for God only, and we humans deal in emotional and ad hoc solutions. Annear tempers his straight lines and delicious curves with deliberate imprecision. Often avoiding the obvious meeting point of lines or the predictable completion of a shape, he creates a new and believable tension between the elements of his compositions. By means of varied texture and the habit of layering, he builds a complex painted surface which only releases its relevance and meaning gradually.

Polka Dot Still Life (Sandy Pink), 1999 oil on board, 47 x 63.5 cms

The forms dive and swoop, point and oscillate, stack up in geometrical rhythm, syncopate and resonate. The placement of colour, in wedge and angle, trapezium and semi-circle, is altogether more assured but also more subtle; in a word, more masterly. His earlier work was distinctly painterly and expressive, and gradually, over the years, his approach has become increasingly geometric and linear. Then the still-life forms were clearly in evidence â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the mugs and jugs and teapots were recognisably what they were, and guitars were a frequent feature. In recent years, these descriptive forays have been distilled to simple outlines, shapes rather than objects, and even the outlines have grown increasingly less specific. Thus a couple of related curves might suggest a jug, but they might equally refer to the side of a hill or the contours of a body.

Around the late 1990s, his paintings took on the look of collages – as if differently patterned papers had been torn and overlain in a search for related form and composition. The polka dot became a key element among towers or table-tops of connected shapes. Gradually the forms have been pared down to their bones, their skeletal outlines. The patterns

Cornwall and the Lizard peninsular where he lives are clearly of immense importance to Annear. It is no coincidence that nearby lies the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, a major satellite communications centre founded on the Lizard in 1961, with more than 60 satellite dishes facing out into space. That prevalence of circle, dish and cone shapes in the

Linear Melody (Yellow Blue), 1999 oil on board, 25.5 x 71 cms

have been simplified, the carried spatial presences brought into line on the picture plane, though always with a suggestion of greater complexity than first appears. In general, the work has become increasingly evocative and atmospheric rather than declarative and descriptive. Yet the crispness of line which Annear favours has never been sacrificed. Perhaps its authority derives from the unconscious – as does so much that is pertinent in art – for Annear is a great believer in the Surrealist strategy of automatic drawing. His art is a system for harmony, a search for beauty. The familiar dialogue between abstraction and representation is given a new twist by the overlaying of interior and exterior, still-life and landscape. His principal subject has long been a fruitful combination of still-life and landscape, yet each painting is also a kind of portrait - of a mind at work. As Norbert Lynton wrote of Annear in 2000: “It strikes me that he speaks primarily of landscape and of nature while his overt subject-matter is most often still-life.’ Annear has in effect created a new hybrid genre in which the forms of still-life are superimposed over the vistas of landscape. Lynton also identifies what he calls ‘an urchin cheek’ (like pavement chalked graffiti, perhaps) to Annear’s lines, which can be said to link him to such post-modernist masters as AR Penck and Sigmar Polke.

Light Forms (soft white), 2001 oil on board, 71 x 71 cms

landscape has surely been a reinforcing factor in Annear’s particular blend of organic and geometric forms. Sea-horizons too are a crucial ingredient in his imagery, bringing to the work a salt taste of distance and an implication of travel. Each artist carries a personal list of artists important to them, their own sense of tradition. For Annear, Klee and Kandinsky, Arp, Braque and Morandi, the loopy linearity of Miro, but above all Picasso, are among his inspirations. Of English artists, Ben Nicholson is an obvious point of comparison. Annear deals compulsively in outline or bounding line (as in limits), but also outline as in summary or suggestion. Line becomes metaphor, superimposing, overlapping,

interlocking, suggesting blueprints and diagrams or the structural order of landscape behind appearances, of cup and jar at the heart of still-life. A sense of the physicality of place is balanced by an equally commanding feeling for the rhythm and beat of placement. Geometry is here too, forms folding into one another like screens, abutting, leaning,

this latest body of work. Interestingly, the format has also noticeably changed: there are more vertical compositions here. (In fact, out of 30 paintings, 26 are vertical.) A couple of the darker upright paintings are particularly effective, for instance Icon V (Terra Incognita) (no. 4) and Icon VI (no. 2), both of them dense with allusion.

Harbour Forms III (Blue Edge), 2008 oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cms

Sand Forms with Ochre Disc, 2010 oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cms

surfacing and disappearing, straight line against curve, inner and outer, edge and insert, proposition and echo. Much of Annear’s picture-making is concerned with reconciling flatness with space and movement, with the linear directive (the analytical line and deconstruction of form), and with the language of signs. Looking at these new paintings, there is less of the rich, buttery palette-knifed paint, and far greater emphasis on veils of colour lightly scumbled over one another. (To scumble is to modify an existing colour by applying a thin layer of semi-opaque paint to give it a softer effect. To blend. This can also be achieved by rubbing the painted surface.) The resulting skin is much drier in appearance, not laden with fat paint, but stained – as in Earth Rhythm (no. 7), although this painting effectively juxtaposes both types of surface, refulgent and matt. Generally speaking there is a greater variety and range of surface on offer among

Echo Space is the principal painting here, without doubt a masterpiece of this period of Annear’s work, a superb picture beautifully modulated. This artist has long been known for his concision of image, but he has reached a new peak of lucidity. Crossform Offset (no. 6) is only slightly less inventive and memorable, a fine painting solidly constructed and intriguingly nuanced. In Contrabalance (no. 18) Annear is at his most Ben Nicholson-like – which is actually not that much. Nicholson is an inevitable presence for second generation St Ives painters, and the challenge is to acknowledge his inspiration (if not influence) without succumbing to its limitations. The central triangle of Annear’s painting is overlaid by a pale greeny-blue arch, more human rump and back than guitar sound box, which it also resembles. It’s a distinctive shape that reappears throughout Annear’s oeuvre, sometimes

Jeremy’s studio, 2009

Jeremy’s studio, 2016

summoning up the landscape, at others the interior. Here the variants of blue and brown (signature colours for Annear: sky/sea and earth) sing gently and persuasively together.

in the two series, Icon and Earth Rhythm. The shapes are fielded and brought together with great aplomb. Triangles, trapezia, sections of circle and ellipse, echoing and playing off against each other. There is much formal grace here, as witness the wedge of stripes against other-angled bands in Blue Prism I (no. 25), a beguiling small painting, or the subtle and exquisite Form Dance (no. 28). In Folded II (no. 30), the forms appear slightly cropped and overlapping, wrapped around a central core. Annear conjures serenity in the midst of flux.

Harbour I and II (nos. 23 and 24) are excellent smallish pictures, as is the tall thin Echo I. And I can’t help but notice the benign presiding spirit of Juan Gris in this group of works – particularly

Gathered Objects (Earth), 2012 oil on board, 24 x 39 cms

The great American painter Philip Guston said: ‘I would like to think that a painting is finished when it feels not new but old, as if its forms had lived a long time in you, even though until it appeared you did not know what it would look like.’ The forms of these new paintings by Jeremy Annear look as if they have lived a long time within him, while yet retaining a freshness and bloom which suggests the immediate and spontaneous. They are well-worked but not over-worked, and they mark a high point in this artist’s creative endeavour. In conclusion, I return with great pleasure to the compelling limpidity of Echo Space (no. 9), a museum-quality painting if ever I saw one, a major achievement in Jeremy Annear’s already garlanded career.

Andrew Lambirth May–June 2016

Author and Art Critic

2. I con V I , 2 016

oil on canvas 122 x 92 cms 48 x 36 ins

3. I con I I ( F ol d in g F orm ), 2 016

oil on canvas 120 x 100 cms 471⁄4 x 393⁄8 ins

4. I con V ( Terra I n cog nitA), 2 016

oil on canvas 120 x 100 cms 471⁄4 x 393⁄8 ins

5. I con V I I , 2 016

oil on canvas 122 x 92 cms 48 x 36 ins

6. Crossform O ffse t, 2 016

oil on canvas 122 x 152 cms 48 x 597â &#x201E;8 ins

7. E arth R h y th m , 2 016

oil on canvas 100 x 70 cms 393⁄8 x 271⁄2 ins

8. E n c los u re , 2 016

oil on canvas 103 x 127 cms 401â &#x201E;2 x 50 ins

9. Ec h o S pac e , 2 016

oil on canvas 122 x 152 cms 48 x 597â &#x201E;8 ins

10. Ec h o I , 2 016

oil on canvas 100 x 50 cms 39 3⁄8 x 19 5⁄8 ins

11. Ec h o I I , 2 016

oil on canvas 100 x 50 cms 393⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

12. M e tros pac e I , 2 016