"I am looking at where things collide, how these things respond to each other. I like the contradictions and the friction that results. I have been thinking of things like overlapping worlds."
—Hurvin Anderson

 

 

 

 

Painted in 2011, Hurvin Anderson’s Country Club—Mixed Doubles is a stunning example of the artist’s celebrated Country Club series that pulses between sharp geometries and lavish brushwork, memory and imagination, figuration and abstraction. The artist presents a visual feast of painterly marks as the eye scans the canvas—from abstract strips to grid-like dots, light pastel tones to deep primary hues, gestural swathes to impastoed dabs. Set against a lush, wooded area, the scene depicts an empty green tennis court with a dark maroon ground beyond the baseline, sectioned off by towering fences that suggests a sense of unsettling seclusion. The linear verticals, horizontals, diagonals combined with the uniform speckles flooding the canvas at once exude vibration and stillness, transporting the viewer into a matrix of alternate dimensions in space.

 

"I had always felt a double-edged thing about who I was and where I came from. In Trinidad I could be all these things, I was the Englishman, but I was also the Jamaican. It was an interesting place to explore this no man’s land, you could kind of drift back and forwards between these identities."
—Hurvin Anderson

 

Fundamentally imbedded in his personal conflictions of identity as an ethnically Jamaicain, English-born artist, Andersons’ works reveal his fascination with the concept of distance—mentally, physically, and visually. This rootlessness manifests in Anderson’s oeuvre as a remarkably diverse art historical dialogue within his practice. As his washes and the muted vibrancy of his images reminisce of Color Field painting, his stencils and architectonic approach recall geometric abstraction. The concern with formal construction and the dreamlike quality of the artist’s compositions bring to mind the frequent comparisons made to his contemporary and teacher, Peter Doig, with whom Anderson studies at the Royal College of Art. From Doig’s series of Concrete Cabins to his Caribbean scenes, the conflux between the two artists is certainly apparent—but it is ultimately the concept of memory space that culminates their convergence in a striking light.

 

"When you take a photograph you focus on something in the distance, but you get this residue of highlights, a glint of light. Maybe I was too obsessed with the hexagons, but the more you work with it the more you see that even a glint of light could describe something, could disturb the surface."
—Hurvin Anderson

 

 

 

 

Working from drawings, photographs, and his own recollections, Anderson reimagines the past into complex spaces that speak to the individual and cultural significance of his work. In his Country Club series, the wire lattices guarding the tennis courts allude to the isolation of locals into Jamaican country clubs during the colonial era, functioning as a physical and symbolic barrier breeding exclusion and desire. In the present work, Anderson virtuosically manifests this tantalizing gaze between the second and third dimensions. The organized hexagonical spots evoke the sense of peering in from outside the pictorial space as they subtly obstruct our view of the forbidden realm just beyond reach, creating a distance that realizes the alluring yet unattainable.