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saw her last she had rather a ruddy complexion,” Simmons recalls, explaining the pink coloration of the drawing: “so that’s where I went with it, and then of course there’s her dominant left eye.” He has compared the alternating black and white bands of the drawing to the waves of the sea – one of Hambling’s recurring subjects – as well as the thick black lines of her mascara. In a painting of Simmons made in 2013, Hambling produces an equivalent sense of the physical person and his ambient ‘force field’. Simmons appears bare-chested and smiling faintly against a shimmering accumulation of black, white and red brushstrokes – colours presciently close to those of his orbicular portrait. Just as in Simmons’s drawing Hambling stares out from the centre of an abstract radial field – albeit as a disembodied eye – Simmons here appears solitary, naked and Christ-like against a rising wall of colour, whose intricate mass of flecks and undulations bears an uncanny (if accidental) resemblance to his own digitally-generated sound compositions, as they appear on his computer screen. Hambling’s portrait of Simmons is juxtaposed, to form a diptych, with another painting that shows a tsunami whirlpool. Originally a separate work, Simmons studied this picture in Hambling’s studio during breaks from sitting. In the process, it became an integral part of her representation of him – at the same time as mirroring, by chance, the vortices of his own orbicular drawings. The juxtaposition of seascape/landscape and the naked body once again dismantles artistic categories: the body is figured as a kind of landscape, the self as a centrifugal torrent. The image of Christ, a vague presence in Hambling’s portrait of Simmons, was summoned overtly by Sebastian Horsley – the catalyst for the present exhibition – when he travelled to the Philippines in 2000 to take part in a ritual crucifixion for Easter. The trip was recorded on a handheld video camera by Sarah Lucas. Her film bears witness to the gruesome event of Horsley’s foot-support breaking: the weight of his body pulled the nails out of the cross and he fell semi-conscious to the ground.
Top: Sebastian Horsley, The Crucifixion Nails of Sebastian Horsley, 2003, edition of 10 pairs in sterling silver, 1/10, 29.21 x 25.4 cm Bottom: Stills from Sarah Lucas’s video of the crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley, Philippines, 2000
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Opposite: Maggi Hambling, Sebastian in a Hermes scarf, 2004, charcoal on paper, 152.4 x 101.6 cm
03/10/2018