Venice / Shadows

The Green Château, In Central Park, Bombay Sunset… Howard Hodgkin sometimes chooses titles that would suggest landscapes, but the paintings themselves never do more than suggest landscapes. House Near Venice (1984-88) includes what appears to be a house reflected in water, but other Venice pictures are no more than blurred hazes of colour. Venice / Shadows (1984-88) suggests the idea of a cool doorway or the pattern of sunlight and Venice Grey Water (1988-89) gives a sense of the lagoon – not grey but shifting greens and blues. Hodgkin’s Venice, like Turner's, is a city of memory and floating forms. Rather than landscapes, these paintings are about passing time, with its moments of clarity and confusion. As Andrew Graham-Dixon has written, they are works in which ‘topography is displaced by metaphor.’