The title of the earliest painting in this exhibition ' Heart's Ease', 1984, refers to the wild pansy flower popular during the Victorian era and thought to represent romantic love. The flower also, however, appears in Shakespeare’s ' A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream', where its magical aphrodisiac properties cause considerable mayhem. The same year Derek Jarman created this painting, he was working on one of his most beautiful films, ' The Angelic Conversation', 1985, a love story between two young men, which he shot using Super 8 film and video. The film opens with the sound of a...
The title of the earliest painting in this exhibition 'Heart's Ease', 1984, refers to the wild pansy flower popular during the Victorian era and thought to represent romantic love. The flower also, however, appears in Shakespeare’s 'A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream', where its magical aphrodisiac properties cause considerable mayhem. The same year Derek Jarman created this painting, he was working on one of his most beautiful films, 'The Angelic Conversation', 1985, a love story between two young men, which he shot using Super 8 film and video. The film opens with the sound of a clock ticking and the recitation of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unfolding without recourse to a direct narrative, it uses a black and gold layering of moving imagery to seduce the audience.
This two-part presentation of Derek Jarman’s work traces the development of his 'Black Paintings', the most significant series of paintings that he produced up to 1991. The chronological thread reveals significant thematic, iconographic and textual parallels between the paintings and the films and writings he produced over the same period.
The format of the small black paintings share something with Jarman’s black and gold square notebooks – recording memories, photographs and research for his latest projects. They weave together ideas and life experiences, experimenting with the trajectory of time. Similarly, the 'Black Paintings' register the complexity of his thoughts while crystallising the extraordinary nature of Jarman’s multimedia oeuvre.
