Blots on the Landscape

By Sammi Gale

In paintings such as Hawksbill Bay (2020), from Hurvin Anderson’s Jamaican hotel series, modernist buildings are engulfed by tropical trees and foliage. If I was a synesthete the palette – greens and blues tuned to an electric pitch – would smell of ozone. Perhaps because these scenes are so moreish (or because a woozy afternoon in the Caribbean is such an appealing idea) Anderson gets cast inadvertently as a painter of hot, atmospheric landscapes. But he is so often interfering with places: erecting fences, peering through grilles, jostling with boundaries. He paints the terms in which a place can be seen at all.

"greens and blues tuned to an electric pitch"

This becomes apparent on entering his exhibition at Tate Britain, where you are met with Siding (2013). A dense field of vegetation interrupted by a delicate square grid (achieved by the removal of string from the painted surface) seems to hold the viewer at arm’s length. The eye catches on the square cells, while in certain places green and yellow paint appears to spill over them, making the foliage seem all the more abundant. The titular railway siding, a slither of track towards the canvas’ bottom lefthandside, is glimpsed beyond a fence; the viewer’s perspective, then, is to the side of the siding. The authorities erect the fence, control the train line, but the artist decides where we stand.

Grids, lattices and screens recur throughout Anderson’s work. You could see them as metaphors — markers of separation, of exclusion, of the various thresholds that structure diasporic experience. The decorative security grilles in his Welcome series (2004-8), for instance, bar entry; they organise the paintings, compete with and dominate them. Yet all this iterative thinking and eye for pattern is welcome, so much so that at times it is the scenery that seems to get in the way of the grilles, not the other way around – as if a purely abstract minimalist painter were screaming to get out. (In his 2011 exhibition Subtitles, abstraction, especially the diamond and sunburst patterns of what seem like wrought iron fence sections, take a more central role.) In Country Club: Chicken Wire (2008), we might be excluded from the members-only tennis court, but it’s nonetheless visually demoted by its own stillness and precise delineation, especially in comparison with the light dancing across the foreground’s hexagonal chicken wire. Similarly encountered through a filter that demands attention in its own right, the chevron pattern on the beads in Beaded Curtain (Red Apples) (2010) prevents a stable reading of visual depth; the painting’s light brushwork suggests the slightest swish, as if the curtain was not long ago brushed past, unsettled. 

"as if a purely abstract minimalist painter were screaming to get out"

In fact, subtle movement ripples throughout the exhibition, creating various states of rest and restlessness. No One Remembers (2021) evokes the sensation of scenery rushing past in a car (as well as the way fragments of memory sometimes rush back). In Wait a Moment (2019), a man rests under a tree, while the complex shadows of its branches criss-cross the sand beneath. Anderson’s Barbershop series features abstract posters and notices pinned up around mirrors that have their own rhythm – a work called Essentials (2017) strips this gesture down to its bare bones; coloured rectangles float across the canvas. 

"the painting’s light brushwork suggests the slightest swish, as if the curtain was not long ago brushed past, unsettled."

The arrangement of surfaces, reflections and geometric shapes supports a sense of ease: it reminds me of how having serious conversations is easier in the car, the road ahead mediating the pressure of direct eye contact; with the eye drawn gently to different sections of the canvas, the viewer is able to linger, observe, and ‘converse’ with the image much as one would within the barbershop itself. 

For better or for worse, in Anderson’s paintings, we are there and not there at once; often his figures suffer from this sense of bilocation too. In Beaver Lake (1998), two faceless figures stand on the tundra, their bodies partially absorbed into the ground, threatening to dissolve entirely. In Hollywood Boulevard (1998), a Black cowboy materialises in the clouds between a father and son, occupying a threshold between the earthly and the celestial, as in Renaissance paintings, and thus also straddling high art and Hollywood: Handsworth, in Birmingham, and the great frontier.

"in Anderson’s paintings, we are there and not there at once"

The distinction between hosted and hostage is often very slight — Ashanti Blood (2021) sees the titular flowers represented by just a few daubs of scarlet paint, but invokes Jamaica’s history in the transatlantic slave trade. Outsider or tourist — Anderson rarely lets the distinction settle. Instead, he fixes us in the act of looking, aware of the structures that make it possible.