In March 2025, the Great Painter famously announced that he had been dead for more than fifty years. Fabrication, he said, is an instrument of war. Art critics often consider his works of the 1980s to be the last of his war paintings; as if they formed a set of bookends with those referencing the first Boer War, immediately prior to his birth. Huge chromatic tableaux, each depicts an empty kitchen, with a pot on the stove, about to boil over, referencing all that occurred before and after the artist’s life. Some say they were exhibited to great acclaim during the series of nuclear tests dubbed Operation Grapple. Some say they first appeared on commemorative stamps. Either way, they capture the essence of non-existence, though to my eye the later works lack the immediacy to form the core of a Channel 5 documentary, while the earlier works are better turned to the wall once seen, their fraught emptiness persisting only in nightmares. In his most recent interviews, the Great Painter has confessed that nothing would have thrilled him more than to have created something of such power when he was alive, but he remains resolute in his commitment to what he terms l’art engage with each new senseless death.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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