JOHN VIRTUE: TOWARDS BLACK
Paintings and Monotypes
This presentation pairs John Virtue's paintings and monotypes from 2003 onward with the artist's most recent black canvases. They have never been shown together before.
For almost fifty years, Virtue has worked in black and white alone. Since the late 1970s, he has built his work around walking, returning again and again to the same routes near wherever he has made his home, from Lancashire and the Exe estuary to London, Italy and the North Norfolk coast. In 2003 he became the sixth Associate Artist at the National Gallery, and his monumental London skyline paintings were shown there in 2005.
The monotypes are central to the exhibition. For Virtue, they are not a separate printmaking practice but painting by other means, carried out on paper. Each is a unique impression, made by working ink onto a plate and pressing it onto paper. Shown here are examples from London, Venice and Norfolk. The black in these sheets is dense and pressed into the paper, and it points towards where his painting has now arrived.
In his most recent paintings, Virtue has moved beyond the recognisable motifs of the city and coast into complete abstraction. The dialogue between black and white that defined his earlier work has been pushed to its limit. White, once the carrier of light, sky and air, is now marginalised and almost obliterated, surviving only in thin seams, scraped edges and small flashes at the margins of vast fields of black. What remains is painting stripped to its essentials, in which the physical fact of the canvas becomes the subject itself. Layers of heavy carbon-black acrylic are applied with broad brushes, scraped back and reworked again and again, until the surface carries the accumulated history of its making, by turns glossy and matt, dense and fractured, absorbent and resistant. These are works that ask to be encountered in person, where scale, texture and the play of light across the surface give the dark expanses an unexpected depth and energy. They confirm Virtue as an artist still restlessly testing the boundaries of his own practice.
Shown together, the monotypes and paintings trace one sustained argument about black: from a mark that describes a city or a sea, to a material presence in its own right.
Virtue's work is held by Tate, the British Museum, the V&A, the Walker Art Center and the Yale Center for British Art, among others.
The fullest account of Virtue's career to date is John Virtue by Paul Moorhouse, published in 2019 by ALBION Ridinghouse. Moorhouse is a former Tate curator and was Senior Curator of Twentieth-Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery from 2005 to 2017. He has followed Virtue's work for more than twenty years. The book is a 285-page illustrated monograph that traces the work through each place the artist has lived and worked: Lancashire, Devon, London, Italy and Norfolk. It runs from the gridded observational drawings Virtue first exhibited in the late 1970s to THREE, a six-metre-wide white painting completed in 2019. Throughout, Moorhouse draws out the themes of time, mortality and the intensity of lived experience that run beneath the landscapes.
PATRICK DAVIES
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