Damien Hirst

Suspended in nine rows and ten columns across each of the four canvases that comprise the present work, individually painted roundels of carefully distinct hue, span the entire chromatic spectrum. When viewed in sequence, the character and tone of each canvas possesses a distinct mood. As made famous by Vivaldi’s treatment of the theme in classical music and as translated onto canvas by painters from Nicolas Poussin to Cy Twombly, the symbolic potential of the four seasons as symbols of the cycle of life has long been evoked in music, poetry and painting since antiquity. In Hirst’s progression of Spot Paintings, the fresh and delicate tonalities of the first canvas gives way to a riot of bold pigment in the second canvas, which ebbs into the deep and golden tones of the third, finally ending with a colder palette of icy hues as the sequence comes to a close. Here, Hirst’s seasonal evocation of the progression from Spring to Winter – a metaphor for the journey from birth to death - is conveyed with clinical efficiency. In contrast to Cy Twombly’s whose explosive treatment of the same subject via visceral mark-making recalls Claude Monet’s proto-abstract impressionistic portrayal of his water garden in Giverny at different times of the year, Hirst effects sterile and machine-like control over this typically sensuous and atmospheric subject matter. 

Nonetheless, though disseminated via a simple schema of geometric logic, the emotionless self-control of Hirst's candy coloured grids belies an unsettling and fractured viewing experience: "If you look closely at any one of these paintings a strange thing happens; because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony... in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment" (Ibid.).