Roger Hilton

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the Earl of Gowrie, circa 1980
His sale, Sotheby's London, 24th May 1990, lot 730, where acquired by the present owner

London, Southbank Centre, Roger Hilton, 4th November 1993 - 6th February 1994, cat. no.54, illustrated, with Arts Council tour to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought, Thames and Hudson, London, 2007, illustrated p.213;
Adrian Lewis, Roger Hilton, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003, p.92.

Original canvas. Generally the work is in good original condition. There are some fine minor lines of craquelure in places to the extreme edges where the canvas is pulled over the stretcher, and some further lines to the white impasto along the left edge, with one small spot of resultant lifting. There is a stretcher bar mark to the center of the left edge. There are a few very minor scuffs to the paint surface, including to the black pigment upper right, and one to the orange pigment lower centre. The surface is slightly dirty with some flecks of studio detritus. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of retouching. Held in a white painted wood frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'I like my colours dynamic and strongly contrasted. After all, one prefers something alive to something dead. The more alive a person or picture, the better they are. Any picture which does not give an immediate sensation of vitality is a dead picture.'
(Roger Hilton, 'Artist's Statement', published in Lawrence Alloway (ed.), Nine Abstract Artists, Their Work and Theory, Alec Tiranti Ltd., London, 1954, pp. 29-30).

By the late 1960s when this work was painted, Hilton was an artist of international renown, considered to be one of the most original and exciting painters of British Post-War art and represented by Waddington Galleries, one of the leading avant-garde London galleries of the time. Winner of the John Moore’s prize in 1963, UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and a reluctant recipient of a CBE, Hilton had developed a unique bold style that blended control with wild abandon, measure and intuition. His primary concern was with the act of painting and although there is an influence of contemporary European and American trends, his canvases come alive with an originality of expression as he fearlessly experiments with line, colour, space and texture in his work. As he aptly puts it: 'The greatest artist will be the one who most completely lets the medium shoulder the idea' (The Artist, quoted in Into Seeing New: The Art of Roger Hilton, (exh. cat.), Kettles Yard, Cambridge, p.6).

In this work Hilton has utilised charcoal line on the canvas, which became a distinguishing feature of his work from 1956 onwards. He did not use charcoal as a means of under-painting or outlining a form as was traditionally expected. Rather, he drew over and onto the paint using a variety of densely worked strokes and barely discernible delicate traces, making the drawn line crucial to the composition, and as important to the effect as his application of paint. Indeed, drawing was so important to Hilton that it formed part of his daily routine - he would draw every morning to engage his mind before commencing a painting. Chris Stephens describes its importance in his work: 'There is something in the quality of these lines, in the quality of the paint and in the relationship between the two that is both suggestive and sensual. They serve as a record of the artist's hand but also of a more general touch, of a caress, and at the same time of something visceral if not abject' (ibid, p.14). 

In Untitled 1967, Hilton has perfected his use of these errant charcoal lines, placing them in perfect harmony to interact and create a tension with the solid abstract shapes which form the rest of the composition. The orange mass of colour which rises with a certain violence of energy from the lower edge of the canvas stands in lively and dominant contrast to the restricted palette of the rest of the canvas. The two spikes fracture the line of charcoal, at one point piercing the irregular black form which protrudes from the upper edge of the canvas and at another almost touching it as if both the black and the orange are poised in perfect balance. Thus the forms are placed with a care that belies their seemingly spontaneous nature. The elasticity of the orange and black forms is contrasted with the static nature of the crescent white shape which is heavily textured in white pigment and hugs the left edge of the canvas. Even the bare ground behind holds a certain kinetic energy as these shapes jostle for space in a constant state of fusion within the confines of the edges of the canvas. As Mel Gooding explains: 'the shapes themselves are intuitively arrived at, and their relations with each other are arbitrary and unsystematic, inconclusive and mysterious' (Mel Gooding, 'Charms against Darkness: The Paintings of Roger Hilton', Roger Hilton, (exh. cat.), The Southbank Centre, London, 1993, p.11).