Images

Gerard Hanson's landscape paintings of Jamaican villages contain a similar feeling of the enigma of arrival and departure that V.S. Naipaul describes of his experience of an English village. The sense of place, of home, of longing and belonging is both comfortably and uncomfortably expressed through hybrid cultural memories.

The lovely houses appear like an idyll, the viewer is allowed to visually meander towards a doorway or a porch in anticipation of a greeting. Yet these little homesteads seen in the distance are both homely and unhomely. The surrounding jungle is intensely coloured, the shadows are super-saturated with blue, and the leaves are alarmingly green. It is possible to imagine the shattering clamour of bird-song, the threat of mid-day heat and the fecund scent of flora and fauna.

This unquiet, burgeoning landscape is exaggeratedly painted towards caricature. The clouds and trees curl like a zany early Mickey Mouse movie, at once both jolly and lurid! These paintings are given an accurate form, located as they are, like paradise, on the exotic periphery of the giant U.S.

Stephen Lee - Curator