About

Julian Bell,

 author of 'What is Painting' and 'Mirror of the World, A New History of Art' writes of Marguerites work...

 

"Marguerite Horner performs a simple, ancient but profound trick with her paintings. She takes a sheet of primed canvas or paper and makes it glow as if lit from within. Physically, the white is no more white than it was before she touched it, but spiritually it is transformed.The markings Horner makes serve not so much to represent views of the world around us, as to activate what lies behind them a quality not to be named, only touched on. A walk in the open with a camera has presented her with an epiphany, some angle of approach on whatever is real." This is an airy, untrammelled pictorial world. The street and its concerns have been left behind. Colours have been left behind, almost - or rather, it is as if we were looking into a pure glow that is the sum of all pure colours. These skies and seas and trees are ghostly, if we read 'ghost' in its old spiritual sense. And yet there is a material particularity to each of Horner's large and arresting canvases." Often a cunning interplay of divergent pigments only reveals itself in a doubletake. There is an equal cunning to her compositional stragegies - the daring imbalances of above and below, the barriers she throws across the act of vision. Those barriers - ripples, branches, clouds - become flowing calligraphic performances. This is committed oil painting, and full of the medium's pleasures. It comes from a painter who has considered her aesthetic options carefully, having secured a wide-ranging technical command." There are many ways one might set Horner's act in context: in the art school where I encountered her work, the talk would have been about photo-painters like Gerhard Richter. I think of her more as an English individualist, and a distinctively northern one: her light-flecked thickets put me in mind of the late 19th-century painter Atkinson Grimshaw. "