Untitled (Red Flags) - Hurvin Anderson
Oil on canvas
166 x 260 cms
2004
"My struggle with Jamaica: I don't know it and I know it. I have this romantic vision of it and a lot of my painting is fighting that romance." Doubly inscribing his love of nature with love of paint, Anderson cuts through this quandary while bringing to light some implicit tensions within Romanticism itself. If it hardly needs repeating that he is a bravura painter – the breathtaking beauty we behold in Maracas Series – Pluck 2010, with its delta of blue and green, could only be the work of a virtuoso thoroughly knowledgeable about the materiality of of soluble pigment – then it is as well to emphasise how abstract tendencies prevent his scenes from congealing into tourist ideals. The sheer daring of the outburst of cobalt runnels at the heart of Hawksbill Bay amplifies nature's unstoppable resilience; as a result, out attention is suspended at a distance that thwarts any possessive impulse. Indeed, it is not just nature's beauty but its inexorable encroachment into the human-made world of colonial history that is emphasised in the decayed signage of Imperial 2004. Alerting us to the peril at the point where land meets sea, Untitled (Red Flags) 2004 thrills with its scale of composition as a steep vertical drop of green-black foliage plunges to the ocean beneath. With flick-of-the-wrist precision, each brushstroke – whether dot, scumble, or drip – acts in the dialectic of distance and intimacy to put nature's beauty in the foreground but out of reach. "Seeing diasporically" thus navigates a route between two extremes of enlightenment thought. For Immanuel Kant, "the will is the thing that distinguishes human beings from other objects in nature" – which meant nature was mere matter to be overcome – while in full-blown Romanticism it was nature's power and indomitable force to which humans were to surrender as they experienced the beauty of non-human matter as sublime. In the moment when beauty happens upon us, taking our breath away, Kant also said that "disinterestedness" was the condition of aesthetic experience. When possession is no longer our aim, "the world opens up to us and becomes fuller as we shake ourselves loose of interests that circumscribe our existence". Instead of the "dislocation" some associate with diaspora life, the cool detachment Anderson brings to landscape painting turns a new corner in the history of the genre through his introduction of a kind of diasporic disinterestedness into his intermediated sightlines. (Kobena Mercer, "Landscapes of Diaspora, Ecologies of Belonging" in Hurvin Anderson, exhibition catalogue, Tate 2026)
