Geography, experience, and imagination are all crucial to our understanding of islands. In many cases the focus of legend and invention, islands, from Atlantis to St. Helena (home to Napoleon’s last words), have excited and haunted humanity since the dawn of time; they are intensely loved and intensely loathed, they are desired and rejected, they are minutely scrutinised yet often perilously misjudged. On islands we feel alternately landed and adrift, magnified and reduced, fulfilled and voided, at home and in exile.
Norman Hyams’ ‘Islands’ evidences the complex relationship we have with these natural phenomena. Painted using an extraordinary variety of media (including but not limited to oil paint, acrylic, marker pen, and for grounds canvas, vinyl, and paper) and an equally extraordinary variety of techniques, these ‘Islands’ show the wealth of sentiment and experience we seek and find in these often exotic and rapturous outposts. Hyams commenced this body of work in 2022. He is a focussed and committed painter, returning time and again to the same subject matter, seeking within its familiarity an exciting unfamiliarity. As William Feaver wrote on Frank Auerbach in 2009: ‘To Paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it, just as people only blurt out the raw truth in the middle of a family quarrel.’ The same applies here. Hyams experimenting with all the formal features that painting has to offer (media, composition, form, technique, palette, tone, and light among them) is Hyams recording all he feels in response to his subject matter; it is Hyams getting nearer and nearer the ‘raw truth’. The pictures exhibited here have been selected from a significantly larger body of work; the artist and I believe that these are nearer the raw truth than any others.
It is with good reason that Hyams encapsulates within Islands so many different moods; throughout time, islands have been interpreted and re-interpreted in so many various ways. ‘Deportation and isolation’, (translated from the Latin ‘deportatio ad insulum’) was the way in which Roman Emperor Augustus decided best to use the Aegean islands, when he was not using them for pleasure, that is. From 2BC Augustus used islands not only to exile lawbreakers and troublemakers, but so too his rivals. While he had the raw power necessary to subdue any potential threat, he preferred to avoid such open use of force by instead limiting the aristocracy’s ability to organise and mobilize resistance against him. Geography proved mightier than the military. The island has retained its intoxicating appeal throughout the two millennia that have elapsed since. Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe is a landmark. Giving its name to an entire genre known as ‘Robinsonade’, of which Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, Cast Away, and Lost are part, Robinson Crusoe’s popularity resides in its capacity for numerous interpretations: it is an exotic adventure story; a study of solitary consciousness; a parable of sin, atonement, and redemption; an encoded autobiography – and yet none of these explanations exhausts it.
The same can be said, I think, of Norman Hyams’ Islands.
Norman Hyams (b.1966) took to painting comparatively later in life, graduating from Chelsea College of Arts in 2006. He is represented by Hannah Barry, London, and in 2016 he completed the Turps Art School Studio Programme. His work is shown and collected in the UK and abroad. Some recent exhibitions include: Cut Out – Series 1, curated by Freddie Foulkes at HM Electric, London (2023); Spring Without End, Hannah Barry, London (2023); Vermilion Tablecloth, Newchild Gallery, Antwerp (2022); A Very Long Wait, Newchild Gallery, Antwerp.
