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It seems likely that John Squire might not be best pleased that now he is, primarily, an artist when people begin interviews, and reviews like this one, with reference to his work as guitarist and songwriter in The Stone Roses.
But The Stone Roses were a great band, an era defining one for many, and it seems unlikely that if he'd not been in that band he'd have either the money, the platform, or the wherewithal to make the kind of art he is making now. It seems even more unlikely that a gallery as grand as Damien Hirst's Newport Street Gallery would devote a couple of spacious rooms to his work.
Repercussions (2018)
So I was quite prepared to give his Disinformation show a cursory glance and then either dismiss it as the dabblings of a dilettante or damn it with faint praise. At best I thought his work would be a decent riff on styles that others had developed earlier. Like his guitar playing a cynic might say.
But not I. Like his guitar playing, hey - maybe there is a link after all, I found his art infectious and the more I looked at it the more I warmed to it. This John Squire guy has really got something. It seems unlikely he'll ever be better known for art than for music but that doesn't really matter. He's made some really lovely work. The talented git.
Repercussions does as great a job of portraying flesh as it does anxiety and uncertainty and Ether manages to conjure up the extraordinary within the ordinary. I love that Squire has included red post boxes and green tea cups in the background of his paintings. They bring the ordinary part of the equation to the extraordinary while his spectral protagonists provide the 'extra'.
Ether (2019)
The Way Things Aren't (2018)
You can pick up a pamphlet in the foyer or the gallery (one that I've visited several times and always found to be strangely empty - making me think about Grayson Perry's quip that the most creative thing about Damien Hirst is his accounting, and wonder (with no proof whatsoever) if this gallery is some kind of tax evasion scheme) which includes a transcript of a conversation between Squire and fellow artist Michael Joo.
It's, for the most part, pretty boring. But it does touch on how Squire, despite being fifty-six years old, has been influenced by Snapchat and how the 'digital glitching' provided by that app appealed to his penchant for geometry. He talks about not diluting the source material, the photographs, that he's worked up in oil on canvas to make these rather large paintings that each dominate an entire gallery wall yet somehow, remain, personal and introspective.
No Signal and The Way Things Aren't suggest situations that are, on the surface, completely normal to us. But, by adding extra fingers, blanking out a face, or whatever he's managed to convey something of the psychological portrait. Our old friend!
No Signal (2018)
Time Between (2019)
From Cezanne and Picasso to Jenny Saville and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, many many artists have tried to convey not just what a person looks like in their paintings of them - but what a person is, what a person feels. You'd think it'd be impossible to find new ways of doing this but painting the human face is, like the human face itself, never something we can tire of. We're attracted to faces. If you go on a dating app it's faces they tend to show first (other stuff can come later, I've been reliably informed) and children are naturally drawn to things that look like faces.
It seems we're so attuned to looking at, and for, faces that even when they've been obscured, as Squire has done with several portraits here, we're still attracted to them. If possible - even more so. As if we're forced to solve a riddle of complete a puzzle. Time Between is fantastic, it looks like it could be a still from some hip sixties movie, and Disinformation manages to show an image of a naked young lady in a way that would probably disappoint a dirty old trouser rummager like Edgar Degas.
Disinformation (2019)
Confirmation Bias (2019)
The only work in the show that didn't quite do it for me was the triptych Confirmation Bias. Perhaps because it was a triptych and lacked a clear, or blurred, central image for me to focus on. Triptychs, for the most part, seem to belong as altarpieces or are made by artists who have aspirations to create secular art as meditative as some consider religious art to be.
John Squire's good - but he's not Mark Rothko or Michelangelo yet! The final image of the show, The Dust That Turns In The Sunbeams, suggests he knows this. Not only does it show a bass guitarist, as if to admit he can never really escape his past nor would he truly want to, but the title also sounds like it'd slip on to a Stone Roses b-side quite easily.
Squire, on this painting, said he didn't know who the bassist is but that he liked "the fact that he was posing and having a snap taken in somebody's backroom, dreaming of the big time" and that he was probably "in a band that didn't get anywhere" as if to romaticise the musical failure Squire so obviously escaped.
Escaping musical failure took a while for Squire, The Stone Roses formed in 1983 and didn't crack the charts until six years later, but escaping musical success and becoming better known as an artist will probably take even longer. It's a good job he probably doesn't need the money as it's freed him up to make works that he loves rather than works that he thinks will make his name as an artist. There are just eight Squire's on show at the Newport Street Gallery. An album's worth you could say - though I'd be willing to bet that his artistic career will involve far more regular releases than his later career as a musician and though he may do nothing again that will have the cultural impact of Fool's Gold it's safe to say people won't be asking him much about The Seahorses in interviews in the future.
The Dust That Turns In Sunbeams (2019)
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