Damien Duffy: Untitled, 2006 167 x 167cm

Damien Duffy’s recent solo show at Context contained just four paintings, three of which make up a series which the artist refers to collectively as “the house paintings.” While clearly recognisable as Duffy works, these three do come as something of a surprise. They mark not so much a departure, but a shuffle towards a new direction.

These paintings each include a rectangle and a square, a door and a window, in the manner of a child’s crude representation of a house; the cladding of the surrounding walls makes up a frenzy of nonfiguration. Their source, though, is Giotto’s fresco series in Padua’s Arena Chapel, specifically Joachim’s dream, in which Joachim (the Virgin Mary’s dad) receives a visitation from an angel, who tells him of Anne’s pregnancy. In the painting, Joachim sits sleeping in front of a hut, or more a sign for a hut, with the deep blackness of its entrance immediately behind him. The paradox of flatness and sense of infinite depth in this black, in the context of Giotto’s simple exploration of real space, is striking in its incongruity and prompts the kind of perception games one plays while gazing on a Malevich painting.

The scale of Duffy’s paintings is also Giottoesque, the size of the doors too small to walk through, too large for Wonderland. The houses, then, echo the reduced scale of Giotto’s stage-set landscapes, in which the environment inhabited by his human subjects is squashed and edited to ensure the primacy of the latter and to compensate for the limits of thirteenth-century knowledge regarding depiction of three-dimensional space. (As I write this, I receive the following text message from Duffy:

If nature is like art, this is always because it combines these two living elements :house and universe,heimlich and unheimlich..territory and deterritorialization. D and g what is philosophy. I found this again in a re read. It makes a little sense to painting.)

In lifting this door from Giotto, Duffy has forced himself into renegotiating his surfaces, losing the comparative comfort of the rectangle and giving himself an additional seven sides to confront. In the first of the paintings to be executed, Shelter, this confrontation manifests itself in the form of gestural brushstrokes in greys and pinks, contradicted by sanding down to flatness, thus removing the individualism of the mark-making, while retaining the original visual form. This brings to mind the kind of corporate graphic which puts across the image of arty, but fun, or the backdrop to the studio portrait, which emulates the romanticising of the poverty of developing rustic economies.

The two Haus Bilder paintings are compositionally identical, but executed in very different ways. In both, the door and window are alien intrusions, around which forms collect, like belligerent bacteria or, conversely, antibodies protecting the body of the canvas. In Haus Bilder I this conflict is highlighted by the struggle between drawing and painting, colours refusing to be contained by their boundaries, instead wrapping themselves around, or bouncing against, their hard-edge interlopers.

Haus Bilder II, the star of the show, is just wrong. Duffy breaks fundamental rules of painting, but when considered again in the context of its Giotto inspiration, it becomes right again. Because fresco painting is painted into wet plaster, its execution must be carried out quickly, applying pigment before the plaster sets. To make life easier, it is painted in sections, areas of plaster trowelled onto the wall, the painting constructed jigsaw-puzzle style. When newly made, these areas of the painting are indistinguishable. Over centuries of irregular fading, however, the outlines of the sections become visible, as does evidence of the brush. Duffy has painted amorphous shapes of colour onto a black ground, leaving the marks uncomfortably visible as they follow the contours of the drawn forms. This self-consciously bad painting practice, then, gains an art-historical significance and enhances the kinetic tension within the piece. The blackness of the underpainting reveals the door as a hole, with the same flatness/ infinity paradox of Joachim’s dream, while the window’s depth is removed through the application of the kind of whitewash seen on the windows of disused shops.

Intentionally or otherwise, the appropriation of a relatively insignificant element of that single Giotto painting has apparently created for Duffy a paradigmatic sidestep which may allow him a new visual vocabulary with which to shift direction further. I for one look forward to the results.

Colin Darke is an artist.