Hodgkin Zings

Recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin are on show at the Modern Art Oxford gallery, in an exhibition called 'Time and place'. The old boy is getting better and better, his work becoming bigger, smaller, looser, purer, rawer.

For this traveller, footsore and soulweary, his paintings were a real pick-me-up. Halfway round the show walking into the upper gallery, I couldn't quite stifle the slightly undignified art critical response: 'Gawd, I'm going to cream my pants; fucking gorgeous'. The direct cause of this half-stifled profanity was from being faced with a series of four very large paintings on unprimed plywood. The second one. I want. Badly. It is titled 'Where the deer and the antelope play' (the other three in the series also titled from lines from the song 'Home, home on the range'). As a series from left to right they can be seen as chapters in a visual essay on landscape painting, from the literal - blue sky above a horizon, to the suggestive - scattered daubs of blue or green, broken, sparse, punctuating the surface.

'Where the deer and the antelope play' is closer to the literal end of the scale than one normally associates Hodgkin. A view (presumably a remembered American landscape, the rural idyll of the song being referenced), seen possibly from a sheltered or interior space. A sunlit field below vibrant reds and blue. That sunlit field is the honeypot: its zingingest yellowgreen almost too much for the eyes. Painted for that sudden alchemic lighting that slams its subject closer, throwing the viewer forwards from a shady spot into the light towards its subject. For me it is that moment when passing through a shady wood you are confronted with a patch of brightness ahead, almost too bright, shimmering, appearing unreally close, where the sun has burst through the canopy of cloud and tree-cover.

There are over twenty other paintings on show in addition to the centrepiece big four and nearly all evoke weather and landscape as their obvious themes, and as ever with Hodgkin, the emotional memory associated with them. The titles reference this more literally too: Mud, Leaf, Sky, Big Lawn.

I know Hodgkin finds the term beautiful to be an insult when applied to his paintings, but fuck it, Howie baby, I think they are fierce, challenging, difficult, often violently emotional and increasingly raw, potently immediate, but these paintings are gorgeous.

In contrast to the massive scale of the big four, there is an exquisite miniature titled Leaf. A single brushstroke, a fluid folding sweep of green on board, trace of oil separating deliciously from the pigment into the grain of the surface. It evokes the purity and simplicity of line of great Japanese woodcuts. It is also interestingly quite conventionally framed, though you can see even so that his brush licks the inside edge of its borders.

A Hodgkin trademark is the layering and reworking of paint over not only the canvas but its frame. Here there are several paintings that subvert even that, and also attest to Hodgkin's looser more immediate style, where he has painted his framed works on the reverse of the frames. It is as if in need of something to paint on, he has seen an older painting hanging on the wall, and simply turned it round the other way and got to work. Sounds simple, but I find that quite a lovely idea, though a tell-tale twist of hanging wire would perhaps be too much. I resisted the urge to sneak a peak at what was on the other side.

I came back a few days later, and loved all of these paintings again, more.