richard hamilton vs. james joyce

“in 1949 i did a set of studies for a series of illustrations for the Ulysses. joyce treats each chapter or episode of his book in a different style and i tried to make a pictorial equivalent of joyce’s stylistic leaps: an etching for each chapter. i abandoned the project when i couldn’t find a publisher”.

richard hamilton

the illustrations for the great novel of our century never accompanied the book. richard hamilton, however, continued to revisit the theme right up to the present day, with his characteristic obsession to escape from style and to explore, with great mastery, a variety of graphic techniques. like his admired Duchamp, he has a visceral as well as intellectual animosity towards the personal imprint, the fixed idiolect of an artist. like duchamp, hamilton chooses not from the vast dictionary of nature but from the vast repertoire of images from high and low culture. and like his predecessor, the painter’s kitchen repels him, although he delights in the craftsmanship of the engraver and in the subtle variations of representation which, like a “game of mistakes”, test our ability to perceive and decipher an image and so, paraphrasing the Joycean-style collage, we see the massive figure of Buck Mulligan whose enormous hand recalls the colonialism of the neoclassical Picasso, assaulted by the ungainly character behind him, the sumultaneity of“the transmogrifications of bloom”, the soft cubism of the burial scene, the distorted overhead perspective of the scene of bloom in the bathtub, the irony towards classical anatomy drawings with their imaginative analogies (in another version of the same scene) and that stark degas in “yes” (surely molly bloom lying naked on the bed). the apotheosis of this succession of styles is “in horne’s house” in which a primitive mask, a face of bellini, a young man taken from egyptian art, stephen dedalus as napoleon de gros and bloom as paul cezanne, in a wise conglomerate full of plastical force, coexist in a wise conglomerate full of plastical force.

but erasing the romanticism of the personal imprint also implies poetics: the cooled passion of encyclopaedism, the healthy and necessary humour towards visual culture, the reconsideration of aesthetic canons.

victoria combalía

(extract from the catalogue number ten of the cadaqués gallery, published on the occasion of richard hamilton’s personal exhibition at the ARCO 85 fair, 22-27 February 1985)