Sometimes in art, a work that you think means one thing turns out to mean something else. It’s an enrichment, an enlargement of possibilities, with none of that neon-lit, clever-dickiness you get with Tate-style conceptual art. Genuinely thoughtful artists adopt a more subtle approach. George Shaw is certainly one of those.
A selection of new paintings at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery makes clear that most of us have been guilty of misreading him. I certainly have. Shaw had been widely exposed — he has been artist-in-residence at the National Gallery and was shortlisted for the 2011 Turner prize — but those frontline appearances have been deceptive. There we were thinking he was a hardcore realist, celebrating his suburban roots with minutely observed evocations of his childhood surroundings, when actually he was a slippery symbolist, a cunning naysayer, a suburban Samuel Palmer whose eyes were tearing up at the sight of modern Britain. What looked like prose turns out to be poetry.
The show has a romantic title, Albion Groans, declared in antiquated Georgian fonts with lots of serifs in the gallery paperwork. The ideas of Georgian England may have lost their purchase for most of us, but not, it appears, for Shaw.
“Albion groans” is a quote from William Blake’s epic lament Jerusalem, the full poem, that is, not the short ditty that gets belted out at rugby games and final nights at the Proms, with most of the belters having no tangible sense of Blake’s thunderous pessimism.
“Throughout the whole Creation … Albion groans in the deep slumbers of Death upon his Rock,” the great miserabilist complained in his most accusatory work. Jerusalem, in its truest form, is not a celebration of the indomitable spirit of the land but a lengthy account of the nation’s spiritual collapse. They should put it in the programme notes at Twickenham.
I digress. But meaningfully so. Because these are the ideas that permeate and flavour the new paintings in Shaw’s sad little show. Walking in, we see a carefully painted record of away-from-the-spotlight suburban England. Only after deeper consideration, and a reading of the serifs, do we recognise the spiritual pessimism that underpins it all.
A scruffy oak grows next to a scruffy wall: autumn has arrived and its leaves are turning brown. On an estate, in the space between two houses, someone has dumped an unwanted fridge. A makeshift fence, covered with a tarpaulin, has a flag of St George fluttering behind it: on the tarpaulin, someone has scrawled a cock and balls.
These are the corners of Britain to which posh BBC broadcasters hurry when they need some vox pops of “ordinary people” for the news. Shaw grew up in these habitats. His previous displays have always returned to them, without making clear the dismay and sadness that we sense this time around.
The key painting for me was a view through a window in which some billowing red roses block the foreground to a suburban lawn surrounded by a suburban fence. The roses are beautiful. Their colour sings. But the beauty feels out of place. The roses have something passionate and stirring about them, which the neat green lawn does not: Carmen has stepped into the Queen Vic.
Roses are, of course, the symbolic English flower par excellence. It’s what our rugby players have on their chests when they belt out Jerusalem. It’s the bloom on Henry VIII’s Tudor signage, a flower that stands for the nation. But here, we read in the serifs, they have a meaning that is highly personal. The roses are the ones planted by Shaw’s dad at their house in Coventry. When his mother was dying, neglected by the NHS, they were what she could see when she looked out of the room in which she was confined. A national symbol has been turned into an emblem of loss.
In the show’s second room — it’s a tiny event — Shaw has wandered into the diaphanous world of water colours with a series of glowing portrayals of yet more roses, perfectly painted, one bloom per picture. At quick viewing they could be botanical illustrations, except that the species is unrecorded and what seems to count more is how big and billowing and beautiful they are. A sense of science has been replaced by something closer to love.
The show, therefore, is about loss, about the despoiling of the everyday, about the damage the nation has done to itself, about how Blake was right to fear the fate of Albion. However, none of this is immediately obvious.
At the Redfern Gallery, much more directly, the veteran op artist Peter Sedgley has been treated to a look back at 50 years of his brilliant career. It’s another rousing event, full of art that glows, twitches, shudders and pulses. It makes your eyes feel alive, as if a bucket of water has been thrown in your face.
George Shaw: Albion Groans, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London W1, to Jan 11; Peter Sedgley, Redfern Gallery, London W1, to Dec 19
