NOCTURNES

The first thing that strikes you about Andrew Torr’s Nocturnes series is the abstracted muted colour. These oil paintings seem initially open in structure; two generous blocks where swathes of earthen and luminous paint coexist. The timbre of these hues is both deeply resonant and also charged with a static. The eye is drawn naturally to where these broad areas meet and we notice the formal detailing of a treeline, jaggedly undermining the abstract expressionism. This is landscape painting but not as we know it, instead Torr presents one image and hints at another. No mere representation of the rural idyll but a re-presentation of urban, communal spaces, shorn of their communities. 

Like a wordcount the dimensions of a painting can be an unforgiving thing. Though civilians don’t actively feature - the human form absent from the square linen canvas - their mark is indelible. As Torr puts it; “there are no figures or recognisable buildings in the paintings but the pictures are packed with activity”. This activity houses a multitude of purposes; from the neon-night-pursuits of “drunks and lovers”, to the purposeful sobriety seen in those whose working hours begin with dusk. Clapham Common hangs with a blurred abstract detachment, as if seen through a camera lens covered in Vaseline. Is it viewed through eyes bleary with revelry, or through those blinking awake out of financial necessity? The line separating ground from treeline sags at either side, as if this vantage point encompasses the curve of the Earth. In spite of the blurred vision the viewing platform allows for total scope. It’s a space shared by untold numbers but the viewer takes ownership.

Similar colours, the same 50x50cm canvas, and a shared name is given to another work presented. Here however, there’s more focus. A sharper eye is penetrating this deserted space, the line of light is flatter and the brushstrokes are finer and more detailed. An exact representation of a scene, to be seen, in the present. Seeing the two side-by-side makes the former piece seem like a composite of memories.

Thoughts turn to Blur deepcut ‘Essex Dogs’; with its first person evocations of lurid skies bleeding into hyperreal recollections. “I remember the sunsets on the plains of cement/ And the way the night just seemed to turn the colour of orangeade”.

This series of urban landscapes began in 2015 but Torr has lived around the commons of southwest London for most of his life. Each work is a snapshot of a specific night, but equally represents decades of memory. These orangeade skies fizz with association. Wandsworth Common’s midsummer sunset sparkles as if poured into a glass. One imagines the ground as arid, but emphasis is placed on the sky, occupying - as it does - four fifths of the frame. It is colossal and alight; both with July heat and possibility.

To go back to ‘Essex Dogs’ it’s worth noting the instrumentation behind the sung-spoken musings. A revving engine ignites the tune before conceding to atmospherics and loose percussion: within these paintings you can hear that gasping motor. Not only do The Nocturnes gleam with a petroleum iridescence but the skies depicted throb with the thick ooze of light pollution . Take for example, the burnt-copper blue swills, rising from the skyline of Victoria Park. (Skyglow, it transpires, is the poetically named term for the warped colour palette seen in The Nocturnes, and in a polluted city sky)

How then to present this intense amalgam of shades? (Hues that colour like soft memory.) With traditional techniques. Glaze - a gossamer thin, semi-transparent layer of paint - is applied liberally to these pieces. In so doing a glow begins to emanate and dimensions beyond our initial perception are brought to existence. Take Clapham Common - one of the larger pieces at 100x100cm - where shimmering pools of light bubble from a depth deep within the canvas’s frame. The illusion is of constant movement, like when one shuts their eyes and colours pulsate behind the closed lids. Fitting, as these are the scenes that exist when most of the city is asleep.

The setting is archetypally modern - a night that throbs with skyglow - but the application of the medium, and the format itself, are the opposite. Landscape painting, as convention would have it, belongs on a rectangular canvas but here the custom is subverted with four sides of equal length. This regularity imposes a consistency specific to one city. As Brian Pattern has it;

“At night above the parks the stars are swarming.

The streets are thick with nostalgia”

Note the plurality there: these parks take their own coordinates but share a sky. As thick as the streets are with nostalgia, the canvas is with glazed paint. Each work reflecting and projecting beauty, melancholy, expectation, romance. Spend enough time with these works - or in these parks - and you’ll see all of the above.

It’s this depth of bleeding colour that makes The Nocturne’s so compelling (and conversely is also the hurdle that delayed Torr’s attempts at this series). As he puts it “how

does one make a correlation of this experience in paint layers, less than a hair's breadth deep?” Well - looking around the gallery - like this.