Thoughts That Cure Radically: Howard Hodgkin at Gagosian Gallery

Time and color collude with memory in Howard Hodgkin’s exhibition of recent paintings at Gagosian Gallery. Painted on inverted picture frames inset with planks of wood, Hodgkin’s paintings perhaps strain believability in the ratio of gestation each painting was alleged to the amount of paint present on each board. Battered backs of picture frames surround pristine, often unprimed, handmade artist’s panels that have been smeared with striking cadmiums, nickels, greens and cobalts. Hodgkin has long maintained that his paintings are painterly transcriptions of ‘emotional situations’ where the painting process acts as a plein air observation of the artist’s consciousness. Retaining a signal use of primary and secondary colors, Hodgkin’s work becomes a Proustian meditation on memories’ transformation from experience to recollection held together with color. While painted quickly, each painting is a ‘memory recollected in tranquility’ that has taken years to crystalize into action. Hodgkin’s work distills what Proust, towards the end of the Combray chapter has Marcel, his narrator describe in his remembrance of the two paths in his village:

And so the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in vicissitudes, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. No doubt its progresses within us imperceptibly, and the truths that have changes its meaning and its appearance for us, that have opened new path to us, we had been preparing to discover for a long time; but we did so without knowing it; and for us they date only from that day, from the minute in which they became visible.

Hodgkin’s paintings are indeed richest in episodes when pertaining to the intellectual life pictured through the color and texture of his panels. Aside from the personally oblique importance imbued in each picture, what remains in Hodgkin’s work is an intensely intellectual and formalized relic of color, touch and composition. Memory and emotional aside, what matters are instantaneous moments in the studio where the artist must make a specific decision regarding what color will be placed where and how. Marcel goes on in Swann’s Way

It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along them, that the things and people they revealed to me are the only ones that I still take seriously today and that still bring me joy. Whether it is that the faith which creates has died up in me, or that reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.

Desiring real flowers, Hodgkin heedfully re-creates his memory with the stuff of memory, color. Proust’s Marcel is alien to the present, forever recalling the flowers and walks of his childhood, mediating his present experiences through his primary innocence. Similarly, Hodgkin’s paintings are orphans of the present, recalling their past innocence, attempting recollection.