Pierre Bonnard: Affinities, 2018

Julian Hatton, Graham Nickson, Rachel Rickert, and Katherine Brad- ford all work from perception. Julian Hatton’s exuberant paintings often read as abstractions, at first acquaintance, because of the audacity with which he uses color, but we slowly become aware of their basis in an awareness of specific places and the character of particular trees, fields, hedges, and the like; this connection with actuality can be almost imperceptible but its subtle logic informs the pictures, like the hard to hear but vital continuo in a Baroque concerto. Like Bonnard’s luminous improvisations on the landscapes surrounding his home or the places where he spent time, Hatton’s bold responses to his own environment, are explosive, light-filled, and apparently idyllic—an upstate New York Arcadia? There’s no ambiguity in the relationship of Graham Nickson’s beach scenes and the idealized world of pastoral poetry. Nickson’s terrestrial paradise is an expanse of sand by the ocean in East Coast America, in- habited by fit, athletic bathers. His personages are recognizable mem- bers of our own society: unequivocally modern individuals who practice Yoga poses, dry themselves, fold beach chairs, and spread towels. Yet Nickson’s saturated, superheated, unreal color moves us out of the pres- ent and into an alternative, more perfect world where the long light of