Gerry Smith

Smith’s practice is about capturing the fleeting moment. It is cinematic, as if the frame is just about to move and become another. He sees painting as a cognitive process and describes it as intelligence. Painting is thinking, a way of spelling out one’s thoughts on paper, of recording what has been seen, and engaging the viewer in a mental process.

Influenced by the ubiquitous sign, strong outlines pervade the work with an iconography that is informed by mediated images found in the city—the billboard, the poster, and the advertising broadsheet. Smith imposes a rigorous linearity onto found images, recalling the silhouette, clip art, or the cartoon. His style is one of deceptive simplicity, a reduction of objects to minimal shapes and forms. Yet on closer inspection, painterly gestures begin to indicate movement or character—that the artist refers to as the “hum” of the surface. Such actions convey his love of paint. He favours sweeping impastos, the motion often conveying an additional message, seen for example in Margaret and John (2000). Here the viewer completes the artwork—from a distance images of a cowboy and his girl are visible, but up close, viewed at an oblique angle, the defining brushstrokes inform us that the woman is unmistakeably Margaret Thatcher and by inference the cowboy is John Wayne.

Smith is an artist eavesdropping on society and, in expressing human nature he draws substance and energy from the urban. He is a social player, positioning himself with reference to society, groups, and the crowd. His enigmatic titles, such as Respectful Silence (2004) underline the way his work is rooted in the social and expand his pictorial investigations to layers of meaning that reach beyond visual perception. Respectful Silence dramatically reinforces our potential loss of identity through the enactment of social codes, while at the same time retaining an aura of mystery or curious ambiguity as to why this particular crowd is assembled here. An unconscious appropriation of material from the everyday is evident in the painting, in fact, a casual glance at a crowd scene in a magazine in his favourite Brussels café inspired this work. As in Margaret and John, Smith uses the medium to reinforce the message. Viewing Respectful Silence from a distance, the painting strikes the eye as linear silhouette. Moving closer, the painterly quality emerges, the colours shift, and the work acquires depth and intelligence, reflecting the way that a crowd may feel anonymous from afar, only giving way to individuals and their characteristics as we slip in and become a part of it.

Victoria Preston