Plenty of artists in history have made grapes look good, but none have made them look cool except Patrick Caulfield. It’s not that the pioneering British painter was brilliantly technical, it’s that he had a knack for simplicity, an eye for composition and an ability to turn images into ideas and back again.
This little show is filled with ultra-rare sketches and drawings alongside a couple of big classic paintings. The first works you see are a little underwhelming: an early self-portrait, some studies of bottles and a neat group of half-filled wine glasses, all interwoven circles and curves. But slowly it gets better. There’s a steak on a plate, three beetroots, a little composition of potatoes. And suddenly you realise that he’s made potatoes look somehow hip, chic, cool. That’s his trick: turning the mundane into flattened minimal planes of colour so well put-together and thought-through that you forget they’re mundane. He’s elevated potatoes to brilliant little bits of aesthetic expression. The grapes, especially the vertical painting, are even better; so patterned and smart that you want to wear them as a shirt.
Two massive loans show how special he was when he painted on a bigger scale. The 1960s canvas – a view through a window into an orange room, bright interior framed by perfect pitch black night time exterior – is brilliant.
One painting – a stark portrait of a ‘Woman in Shadow’ – shows that he was largely responsible for Julian Opie, so he’s not without sin, but there’s still loads to like – a cracked window, a pebbled shoreline, a slice of salami – alongside plenty of sketches and studies. It’s a window into the mind of an artist who could turn the world into something new, strip everything back and shift focus until you realise that, actually, potatoes are really beautiful.
