‘Mansions of Memory’ by Maurice Cockrill to accompany the exhibition ‘Recent Paintings’ in association with Wilson Stephens Fine Art, Cork Street, London – 1998.
A clue to the seeming enigma of Simon Averill’s painting is the knowledge that the titles come after the works, that he needs to contemplate what he has made before he can give it a name. This delay or resistance to convert the visual into the verbal holds true not only for the pictures as complete images but also often for their constituent parts.
During his young son’s early years, the artist would walk with him through the countryside, moving at the boy’s pace, slow enough to focus upon nature in microcosm, on the simplicity of water meeting stones, returning home with collections of what came to be called ‘treasures’, pocket-sized fragments from the landscape that seemed to have significance and preciousness for son and father. In the paintings there is a recurrent ambiguous form, somewhere between shell, eroded stone arrow head or seed, having a tactile, palpable quality that stimulates the imagination, arousing conflicting interpretations. It is a honed object that cannot reveal its identity, its name, which perhaps has its origin in those ingenious experiences of the natural world.
This notion of ‘treasure’ persists in the artist’s current paintings but now as treasure within, as it were buried among numerous recollections of both nature and, recently, a restructured vision of the abode, of architecture as shelter and refuge, a conjunction of the natural and the man-made. The conversion of a derelict Cornish barn to house his family parallels the struggle in his art to bring together in a stable structure the many elements of each deeply considered composition.
Again the disinclination to spell out the visual experience offered in a banal, illustrational way governs the look of the work. The preferred horizontal rectangle is often divided into three zones, each housing its own arrangement of imagery, pictures within pictures, that interact to comprise a meaningful whole. However, this whole is full of intriguing contradictions where the artist brings his delicate painterly touch and discriminating sense of colour to bear upon innumerable fractures and ambivalences of scale and depth. Cast shadows seem to describe tangible pictorial space, exits and entrances, openings one’s vision can enter; hallways and passages in oblique and raking perspective invite exploration only to deny or confuse, stairs lead to nowhere. Among the stillness there is a strong sense of theatre, and otherworldliness in an indeterminate era that brings to mind the poetic psychological tensions of Pittura Metafisica, the shifts of vision and multiple viewpoints one might encounter in a dream.
Several of these new pictures contain plaques of cryptic, partially erased writing, indecipherable runic inscriptions, like tablets of illegible commandments that provide further mysteries and suggest the desire to record a personal remembrance or the transience of human activity in the face of the cosmic.
The favourite colours are intense blue, greys of great subtlety and beauty, the colours of earth and rock and sometimes a touch of gold. A particular warm red recurs like a feminine presence ameliorating the disparate components of this separate world, its arches, its roof beams, the pods, the landscape weaving through. There are multiples of things – seven poles, twelve seeds, five stones. Thrusting forward out of the picture space an odd, blunted triangular shard, a jutting angled slab, as if proffering a legacy– the smaller forms laid upon it – pebbles, grains, seeds?
In the desiccated hues and resonant surfaces of Averill‘s impressive group of new paintings, in its binding together of the spirit of the nuclear family and its dwelling in nature there is a metaphor of time passing, of history evolving and of a creative soul visiting the mansions of memory.