Essay by Simon Hucker to accompany the exhibition ‘New Paintings’ in association with Wilson Stephens Fine Art, Albemarle Street, London – 2002.

This exhibition marks a decisive new direction in Simon Averill’s work. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the familiar seeds, feathers and flints that were some of the elements of his previous paintings, these works could be by a different artist altogether. For any painter, but especially for a painter like Simon Averill, who has spent years perfecting a precise visual language full of subtle inflections, such a change is an incredibly difficult thing to undertake. However, I hope that on seeing this new body come together he feels, as I do, that it was definitely worth it.

Averill’s previous work can perhaps best be described as ‘abstract landscape’. His paintings evoked a definite sense of space, and yet this space could then instantly dissolve into patterns of colour and texture. Perspectives would constantly shift and narrow horizons and coastlines dissolve into pure abstract line. This was a landscape carefully observed and recorded, yet at the same time, seen from a distance, almost half-remembered, as if in a dream.

The new work, by comparison, appears incredibly simple. The multiple viewpoints and perspectives have been replaced by an unerring frontality. The landscape, previously the heart and soul of Averill’s work, has virtually disappeared. The mysterious seeds and jagged flints that were once scattered throughout his compositions, both far-away and close-up, are now isolated against a totally abstract colour-field that seems to sit just below the painting’s surface. It’s as if they are trapped behind glass, in an eighteenth-century ‘cabinet of curiosity’.

Pictured below: “Collection 1”

This transformation has its basis in a series of triptychs that the artist began more than a year ago. Motivated by a desire to simplify his work, Averill literally cut along the compositional divisions that separated his earlier works into ‘zones’ of landscape, architecture and ‘still-life’. In doing so, he found that the individual panels made sense as paintings in their own right.

In the months that followed, Averill found himself drawn in particular to the ‘still-life’ element: those objects – ‘treasures’ as he calls them – that he collects when walking in the countryside and which had always infused his more complex ‘abstract landscapes’ with their mysterious presence.

Pictured below: “Seed Tryptich”

However, unlike traditional Western ‘still-life’, which is more concerned with the outward appearance of things, these paintings are more about underlying form and the resonance of natural beauty. They are less representations of actual seeds or feathers, but more interpretations of the qualities that caused him to pick them up in the first place. In a sense, Averill is trying to capture the memory of whatever it was – form, colour, texture – that caught his eye and made him put that object in his pocket.

As such, they have more in common with the approach of Eastern art, which has always looked for underlying form, beneath the ‘floating world’ of surface appearance. In traditional Chinese or Japanese painting, an artist will first study his subject – landscape or ‘still-life’ – and then paint it only when he can do so from memory and with the minimum amount of brushstrokes.

Pictured below: “Transition”

Simon Averill works along the same lines. Although the compositions of his new works often reflect how the artist lays out his finds in his studio, once he has distilled into form and colour what he sees as essential about these objects, he discards them so as not to be tied down with trying to represent their actual appearance (with leaves and feathers being allowed simply to blow away). To an extent, the objects that form the painting’s ‘subject-matter’ only really exist within the painting itself and are actually only ‘found’ through their being painted.

In this way, Averill’s work has much in common with the work of Giorgio Morandi, who also distilled ‘still-life’ into a search for underlying form. Painting the same objects over and over again was an intrinsic part of Morandi’s process, as it is Averill’s. Interestingly, Morandi also used to paint the bottles and vases he used in neutral colours before he started to work from them, as if to remove them one step further from the temporal world of external appearances. He was interested more in a ‘still-life’ of the invisible, of the hidden resonance of everyday things.

In the new paintings featured in this exhibition, Simon Averill has managed to maintain the intensity of observation of his earlier, more complicated ‘abstract landscapes’. At the same time, he has stripped his work right down to a marvellous simplicity, finding in the narrow, interior space of ‘still-life’ a profound stillness, where time flows around forms with an almost imperceptible slowness.