Roger HiltonBy Martin Coomer
Published: November 1, 2008
 
Roger Hilton, "January 1964, Red" (1964). Oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 23 1/2 in.
"Roger Hilton" at Kettle's Yard (Cambridge, UK)
The British painter Roger Hilton was unfortunate on two counts. First, he wasn’t at work in 1950s America, where his reputation as a serious painter in the AbEx mold might well have been secured. Secondly, thanks to the demon drink, he didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from the kind of productive dotage enjoyed by his contemporaries, such as Terry Frost. Hilton’s showings since his death, in 1975, have so far proved rather less than rehabilitative. This exhibition, however, deserves to break the pattern, since it concentrates on the artist’s output between his introduction to the work of Mondrian in 1953 and his move to Cornwall in 1965 (thus avoiding the extended juvenilia produced by this late starter and the whimsical figuration that clouded the last decade of his life). Applying Mondrian’s experiments in frontality, Hilton nails a precise kind of informality that cheerfully breaches boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Key is the juxtaposition of areas of flat or sometimes scuffed-up color and charcoal lines, which brings dynamism to even the briefest of these drawing-paintings. Oi, Yoi, Yoi and Dancing Woman (both 1963), cavorting nudes that respond wittily to Matisse’s dancers, leap out from this compact survey—and would do so in the company of contemporaneous work from either side of the Atlantic. "Roger Hilton" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.
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