Briony Anderson is the new darling of British art. Her first solo exhibition – twenty or so oil paintings exploring the ‘act of observation versus the act of looking’ – held in London last month, proved an art collectors dream. The big cats, including Kay Saatchi and Indian collector Satish Modi, turned up, looked, looked again, and must have felt the same surge of excitement as those who first saw Damien Hirst’s iconic dot paintings.
The paintings themselves were inspired by portraiture commissioned in the 18th and 19th centuries. The central figures have been omitted, and what we are offered is a complete re-rendering… a new idea, poetry for prose.
Let me remember what it is that I really saw…
Beneath the hanging lanterns, a large canvas is alive with tension – loose, expressive brushwork in which many different moods battle against each other, a tendering that surprises me. It speaks, I think at first, about the calm within the conflict, the peace in the storm. I stand there for a while. I think about the artist and what she meant by this mountainous fantasy, ‘From which he observes but does not participate’, and I make the active decision to hang about and get more champagne.
I have often been cynical of modernist art. Like an obscure poem, these paintings so often sing about the meaning in non-meaning, the beauty in nothingness, but explain nothing by it. This time, the observer is forced to find meaning, since the artist definitely means something by it… something that I was just beginning to grasp.
Meanings aside, Briony’s work strikes me as redolent of a unique inner life, the landscape exploited to express a melody that is all her own. I did not get a chance to meet her, but I imagined her as a girl with a capricious look in the eye, a passionate laugh… a cosmic dreamer perhaps.
It is no wonder the paintings sold so well, or that the salt of the art world spilled out onto the balcony, champagne in hand, musing on what they had just seen, returning to that favourite piece where Kay Saatchi had stood, and scratched her head in surprise. There is indeed a rhythmic, fluid beauty to her work that pleases the eye. ‘Distant Viewpoint, 2010’, reminds of Van Gogh’s ‘Crows above Cornfield’; a little later on in the day perhaps, when the storm has fallen and the birds are swarming towards the artist in every direction – a roaring beauty within the dark greys, and blues and whites – all expressing something within themselves: madness, hope, a window to eternity.
Briony’s work is an expression of the human spirit in colour. Bold, triumphant, beautiful – it makes nature less real only to steal from it something that is truly effecting.
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