Page 47 - Studio International - November 1968

London commentaries

Adrian Henri at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts - to November 27

Although he is better known as a poet and perfor-
mer, Adrian Henri trained as a painter under
Richard Hamilton at Newcastle and makes his
living by teaching in an art school. His exhibition
at the ICA (concurrently with the Apollinaire
show) is called 'Adrian Henri: Painter/Poet' and
Henri considers himself primarily as a painter.
Henri the poet fits easily into the Liverpool scene
and displays all its limitations. To see and hear
Henri perform his poems is fine, to read them in
cold print is less so. You need him there; they don't
really stand on their own.
The paintings do. Not so much the earlier works,
the Ubu series. (Isn't it perhaps time people gave
Ubu a rest?) These are a bit too easy, tossed onto
the canvas like a quickly written verse. One senses
little hard thought or concentration behind them.
Even Henri's big early painting 'The Entry of
Christ into Liverpool in 1964', his homage to
James Ensor, full of friends and faces, although
decorative and amusing, lacks the organization,
the clarity of his more recent work.
These—Henri's paintings of food—are quite a
different matter. There is nothing of the Liverpool
scene here. The painter/poet's presence, the per-
former (always sensed in the earlier pictures) has
gone and in its place pure painting of a fine order.
Henri's food paintings are as good as anything
being painted in this country at the present time.
They haven't had much critical attention because
they're genuinely original and don't fit into any
neat slot.
A chop, bacon rashers, salmon or egg salad, a cake
are isolated in the middle of a virginally white can-
vas. They are very cunningly painted in a perspec-
tive that seems to contradict the absence of
anything else on the homogenous white surface.
The food is tangible and yet not to be touched,
edible yet 'for display purposes only'. Henri bor-
rows his presentation from the display techniques
of the shop-window. The white canvas, like the
butcher's or fishmonger's white slab, 'presents' the
food to the customer's eye, isolating a chop from
its neighbour, one piece of fish from another. The
visual discreteness of the salad or chop on the
dazzling white canvas turns it into the salad, the
chop, not merely a chop, a salad (one among
others). These images of food take on the chopness
of very chop, the saladness of every salad. The food
is very hygenic, very clean. No caterpillars in the
lettuce, no flies on the meat : deep-freeze fresh. In a
Adrian Henri in his Studio
room full of Henri's food paintings it's like being
alone in a supermarket.
In a supermarket food is very carefully ordered of course is what the painter has always done. So the salad Henri has brought some flavour of the
and organized. We are presented with a cleverly the supermarket dresser has learnt from the supermarket out with them, a kind of romance of
contrived series of visual images. (They have to be painter. How to mass or isolate. How to make abundance. Although the chops or salad are
purely visual, because whereas in an old-fashioned colour stimulate your digestive juices, how to make isolated, alone on the white canvas, we know that
grocer's smell plays a most important part, in the the housewife's head reel and loosen the strings of there are plenty more where they came from. The
supermarket refrigeration and air-conditioning her purse. food in Henri's paintings are a kind of symbol of
deprive us of the sense of smell.) All you have in a Henri has been into the supermarket and emerged more—like the specimen meals displayed on the
supermarket is your eyes; the other senses have to carrying a couple of chops, a salad, unwrapped the counters in self-service restaurant's from which you
Paul Overy
be stimulated and titillated synaesthetically. This celophane and painted it. And with the meat and can order what you want.
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