Georgia Hayes paints her memories of exotic animals she encountered on a safari trip to Africa. She has painted animals with personalities which range from the almost cartoon cuteness of Sweet Baby Elephant with an eyelash-rimmed smiling eye to the aggressive broken body and manic staring eye of Elephant Head. The cute world of Disney animation or children's book illustration seems at odds with making serious paintings that use an avant-garde painting language. Georgia Hayes takes a gentle but inappropriate graphic style and goes about painting it roughly. She borrows a direct simplicity from the graphic world but changes and transforms it. She paints into these animal snapshots, private pleasures, anxiety and fears. The artist takes a risk, certain that she can make the clichés of the graphic world of illustration into something else. It scares the artist that her paintings will be seen as simple illustrations so this fear challenges her to be resourceful in how she paints.
Looking at the artist's animal motifs, I was drawn to finding a parallel between Georgia Hayes and that of the American artist Philip Guston. They both use a simplified cartoon-like drawing to represent the clash of an inner and outer world, mixing the documentary and imaginative. Guston surprised many with his graphic style, subject matter and raw energetic paint handling and challenged what was allowed in art. Georgia's paintings surprise and challenge us too because they are not what they first appear to be. In each work something is withheld. The colour relationships jar, the space is floating; solidly painted areas suddenly become sketchy drawing, giving an unfinished look. These decisions disrupt any idea of making the look of the painting as easy as the subject.
There is a relationship between the animals being watched by humans and the animals watching us. Giraffe Staring is painted on two panels arranged vertically. The giraffe's ears are cropped by the edge of the canvas. He stares out through eyes constructed from dots and dashes like insect eyes under a microscope. Monkeys Overhead plays upon a sense that the viewer is being spied upon by the monkeys looking down from high. Shooting Round the Baobab pictures a distant antelope sketched in outline surveyed by a man with binoculars. In Watching the Rut, two figures at the edge of the canvas use their field glasses to intrude upon animal mating. And on a second look some of the innocence disappears to reveal a more adult themed look at animals, which defies the idealisation of the cute. In Monkey Trick a male monkey sneakily exposes himself as he hangs from the branches of a tree and a more pensive baboon in Baboon Man hunches over genitals exposed like a flasher waiting for his victim.
The paintings are resolutely modern. They use the language of reduction, flatness and simplification. They suggest description and switch between the external world of fact and invention. Subject matter is transformed through paint. Although there is some observed factual description the artist is not copying the look of art, which uses the photographic or documentary style. These paintings operate on the principle of observation and sensation where the internal world of thought as feeling and the external world of fact and description meet.
Looking at the paintings it is hard to see clearly how they evolved. There is no initial drawing to copy. A colour is painted on the canvas; some marks come up from a hidden place and arrive on the painting. A colour once painted on the canvas can be changed, marks and gestures added and other marks and gestures erased. What has been placed on the canvas suggests to the artist the next move to make. It is like some internal game of chess between the conscious mind editing the moves of the unconscious and intuitive. The pleasure of the immediate is taken apart and dissected in the cool light of day and the questions are asked. How can I make this a good painting? Have I done too much? Does it look too easy? Is it glib? Or have I overloaded the painting and made it too complicated? The finished paintings show part of this private dialogue. Even after many changes some paintings end up looking surprisingly simple. Other paintings show a heavy surface full of revisions. In the end, you have to accept the painted world that is in front of you. And trust it. It is very unfashionable to think that paintings have truth and honesty when the world spins around on a knowing irony and an ability to laugh at the pretension of the past. If today we like our art in parenthesis, it is intriguing to see an artist who has refused to present their view of the world like that. The risk is greater and when successful, the art is harder to dismiss.
The colour in her paintings shifts between a naturalistic description and a suggestion of mood or emotion. It is the world of Matisse, where colour can liberate itself from the need to describe and becomes an element in the painting without having to serve another purpose. In some paintings you will find surprising and extraordinary colour relationships; in other paintings the artist has limited her palette, dispenses with the obvious pleasure found in the unexpected colour choices and the close toned colour hovers sullenly without trying to please.
The space the artist creates is one of the floating world. The space is the space of art from the 20th century full of accident and collision, of several moments in time brought together and the viewer is compelled to make sense and draw out a world that is hinted at and alluded to. Georgia has taken what she likes and finds useful from the 20th century and uses it for her own purpose. She is not in imitation of anyone but her work lies within a modernist tradition that managed to free art from many of the constraints and expectations of what art had to be and how it had to look.
Flatly painted with blocked in shapes made without any attempt to suggest distance through perspective or use the tricks of the trade to create a reassuring spatial illusion these small paintings find a way through their scale to look large. Lines and shapes touch the top and the bottom of the canvas looking like they are squeezed into the picture plane, which makes us feel the canvas is bigger than it really is. In two larger canvases, Hettina the Healer and Shooting round the Baobab, the space opens up and the scale shifts and the feeling of the intensity created in smaller works disperses. The artist resists a formula and each painting is different from the last one; everything has to be re-thought and the whole process of working out how to shape an image out of the random marks and gestures starts again.
The paintings are at ease with themselves but are not easy to make or easy to dismiss. A humour of observation combined with a sensuality of colour, clarity of mark, and an enjoyment in the variety of surfaces that paint put onto canvas can make, gives these works a haunting simplicity. They compress a hundred years of art history, neither being overwhelmed by it and deferential nor borrowing its authority. Georgia Hayes creates a gentle world not mad or angry or mocking, not full of an arch cleverness to be deconstructed. She creates a world that is sincerely felt and painted. The gentleness of her observation and colourful seductive use of paint is pitched against a tough and uncompromising painted language. She makes sharp changes within a painting. Without any explanation a description becomes linear or an area is abruptly left unfinished in a matter-of-fact-take-it-or-leave-it kind of way.
I travelled back to London on the train. I found myself in a train carriage full of odd looking and exotic creatures crammed into a small space. A tall giraffe like man sat opposite me staring and I buried my head in my notes trying to remember the paintings. I was worried. Did they capture an African place and if they did would I recognise it? Various elephants got on the train and monkeys too. I dreaded meeting Baboon Man in such a crowded space. I got off the train and boarded the bus from Waterloo. Baboons Together established their territories, taking over the unoccupied space, grooming and laughing in their purple haze. I heard a familiar-sounding voice telling me I was a sinner and I saw Hettina The Healer, the mad lady holding a bible, a regular sight on many London buses. A cute but overweight schoolgirl trundled to the top deck and as I looked I saw Sweet Baby Elephant, cheeks flushed, who looked so adorable fluttering her eyelashes as our gaze met. I don't know Africa and it's animals. The Africa I know is the Africa from the news. The famine-ravaged, war-torn, poverty-stricken Africa. But somehow I was relieved I wasn't asked to travel to that place and make a moral judgement or to join a political debate. I was glad I had not been directed there. I was asked to see another, more familiar place, full of people I knew or recognised. And I was happy to puzzle why the canvases seem so big even if they were small, and how on earth did the artist manage to squeeze three monkeys onto one painting when Velasquez could only manage one?
Martin Maloney, London, February 2008.