Everyday Painting

I went to London today and saw three exhibitions. The RA Summer exhibition, Edward Hopper and Luke Tuyman, both at Tate Modern. It was really enjoyable; good to compare and contrast different approaches and styles at the RA, but also to make links to Hopper and Tuymans. I know Hopper pretty well from books. He has been a popular artist for students to pick for their A level 'contextual studies' . So I wasn't expecting to be surprised by the pictures. But I was.

There were some I hadn't seen before so they were fresh. There is a surprising taughtness about the work. Is it because the paint is labored in places. Certainly the figures, which in places were clearly quite heavily worked, had quite often been a struggle. Or is it the very carefully constructed compositions,

the narrow palette of colour and tonal control, or the strange voyeuristic subjects, with narratives like film stills?

Luc Tuymans I don't know almost at all and wasn't expecting to enjoy his work. But his handling of paint and use of colour is very good. The banal and obscure everyday subject matter, including the photographic image, was more interesting than I thought. Manet-like in many ways. Perhaps also like Wolfgang Tillmans.

I found most of the written commentary posted on the walls helpful although there were moments of justification that was bizarre:

Recherches ('Investigations'), 1989, also refers to the Holocaust through oblique hints and allusions. The triptych shows, at first glance, a collection of harmless everyday images: a lampshade standing on a table, followed by a blurred image of a tooth, and a window onto a shop or laboratory. These are all details of objects from museums at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which immediately presents a different reading of each image: the lampshade, tooth and laboratory refer to the terrifying Nazi experiments with the human body.

So much information is required that is peripheral to the pictures and their titles that this justification that relates the pictures to the Holocaust seems laboured at best.

Nevertheless, the simplicity of the work was very powerful, and seeing a large show helped put the work in a context and a whole. (although interestingly the show wasn't hung chronologically but "thematically")

The trouble with the Summer Exhibition is that so much that is seen is looked at as one-offs and little context is possible in understanding an artist's work. I am luck in that I have seen many of the artists before. Those I enjoyed? Monoprints by Bill Jacklin, collages by Jennifer Durrant,