Future GreAts
David Smith by Martin Herbert
Why not start over? If that permission comes bundled with the keys to a studio,
most artists don’t use it; David Smith frequently does. Employing what he calls ‘a
stylistically jumpy, cognitive approach’, the London-based twenty-six-year-old
painter has unloosed a prolific and barely categorisable stream of canvases since
taking his MA at Chelsea in 2006 – where a studio visit by artist Peter Peri led to
a hookup with the latter’s gallery, Carl Freedman, and a superb debut solo show
in 2007. There Smith would memorialise a teenage date as a fervid bouquet of
flowers drifting wanly across downbeat minimalist stripes, scrape ‘I am a Psyco’
(sic) onto an acidic spread of yellow impasto and summarise the mournful end of
his family’s farm in a rapid-fire sketch of a ‘For Sale’ sign. What anchored these
diverse works, however, was an unmistakable emotional gravity – a sense that
Smith, for all his hectic variety, was constantly redacting, filtering or ironising
deep-seated emotions. If the mood was often luxuriously bleak, the flexible surety
of touch was thrilling.
But already Smith is somewhere else. The mood swings animating his
paintings are “becoming more closely connected with what I see”, he says, which
made a recent first trip to New York a windfall of sensory experience to be
translated into paintings which formally bear only a slight resemblance to what’s
gone before, though Smith’s delicately bipolar colour sense remains consistent.
A sequence of monochromes has emerged, the canvas sides covered in brightly
coloured tape which, like an Ambilight around a flatscreen TV, subliminally thrusts
the dark, minimal but textured surfaces forward. Interred here are Smith’s recent
crushes on Alan Charlton, Peter Halley and Anish Kapoor, compacted into
a singular, dark-yet-energised aesthetic.
“I don’t feel like I’ve ever made a series of work before”, says Smith,
discussing the paradoxical lassitudes, the energetic returns in terms of focus, of
narrowing one’s margins. One might lazily speculate that lack of precedent within
his own practice was the motivating factor, but Smith is not so predictably
contrary. Rather he’s a model of the painter as self-abandoned to the winds of
sensory experience and the mutability of feeling. “I think I do have a consistency
with mood,” he says. “It’s a place you find yourself in sometimes, when the act of
painting feels particularly worthwhile.”
It’s an anti-intuitive, anti-romantic way of getting there, but is he able to
access the vulnerabilities on show – in his figurative paintings, in particular –
because he’s buoyed up by the act of painting? (One might contain multitudes,
and one’s output might be both brimful of consistency and a model of resistance
to the calcifications of stylism, but escaping one’s nature is no easy trick.) While
stating his desire to “make paintings that I’ve never seen before”, Smith agrees.
“Yes, something dark tends to come out – even though I might be painting with
a smile on my face.” And with that, he turns back to the boundless realm of
his workspace.
facing page: Painting 16, 2008, oil on canvas, 45 x 35 cm.
this page, from top: Painting 37, 2008, oil on canvas, 45 x 35 cm;
Untitled, 2008, spray on wall, oil on canvas, dimensions variable.
All works: © the artist. Courtesy Carl Freedman Gallery, London
81 Artreview
FUTURE~1.INDD 81 11/2/08 12:07:17
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