Hurvin Anderson
In his Maracas Series, Anderson’s landscapes all but dissolve into green abstraction. Each given a different hue, from chartreuse to emerald, teal and olive, the compositions pair gestural mark-making with startling saturation. Perhaps none is as bright as Maracas Series – Lime Green; the colour pressed to the foreground, the paint’s application all the more apparent for the lack of pictorial depth. Named for the calabash tree found across the Caribbean, the title lends the near-abstract work a figurative frame. Still, the legibility of the scene is largely denied; the landscape notated, as art writer Lisa Turvey offers, in “diluted runnel and opaque blot; audacious stroke and calligraphic tangle; scumble, dot, impasto, and wash, splintering the very terrain it defines.” Resisting landscape’s conventions, Anderson shapes his source material – photographs, drawings and memories made during the artist’s stay in Trinidad, which shares with Jamaica a history of long British colonial rule – into images of the island only loosely recalled.
b.1965, Birmingham
“My struggle with Jamaica: I don’t know it and I know it,” painter Hurvin Anderson says of his subject. Evoking memory’s instability, nostalgia’s inaccuracies and the intersecting histories of immigrants, Anderson’s paintings are studies in ambivalence. On his canvases, the real and imagined coincide, as do abstraction and figuration, and the artist’s British and Jamaican heritage. Treading a “tremulous line between beauty and disquiet, between the utopias and dystopias of post-colonial myth and reality” – in the words of art critic Jackie Wullschläger – Anderson offers a second-hand understanding of his parents’ island. The Afro-Caribbean diaspora’s invocation of paradise lost preoccupies the artist’s images; “It is its supposed perfection I find intriguing.” Jamaica offers itself as a symbol of both loss and promise to those who left. “They missed it,” Anderson says, “they felt unsettled here, so it became a utopia.” Then – “Of course, a lot of people haven’t ever gone back.” It is this ambiguity he is drawn to, the sense of longing and unbelonging that colours his parents’ story and others among the Windrush generation. In paint, Anderson traverses the contradictory place the Caribbean inhabits as fact and fiction, and offers his own sense of disconnect and distance from its landscape, with urban decay punctuating otherwise verdant scenes.