Evans is a place on Earth: Luchita, my Reflection:Luchita Hurtado @ the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

"Life and death is just a matter of a border" - Luchita Hurtado.

Still going strong at ninety-eight years old, Luchita Hurtado has had more life than most of us will ever get and, it must be said, is probably closer to death than most of us would want to be. The Serpentine Sackler's career retrospective was, for the shame, the first time I'd been made aware of the Venezuelan artist's work. I was won over.

The bright colours (it feels trite to say as if painted under a Latin American sun but, hey, I've gone there), the clear love of humanity, and her unashamed refusal to tie her colours to the mast of either abstraction or figuration warmed me to her work immensely. I was even more impressed that, closing in on her century, she clearly cares deeply about the future of the planet as a series of works from the last twelve months demonstrates.

It's heartwarming that a painter of such advanced years should dedicate her most recent works to motherhood and birth and it's equally great that her Ecology series, which seems to have been made concurrently with the birthing paintings, shows that she cares about what will happen to Earth long after she's gone. There are men, they are mostly men, my age who'd rather devote their time to posting angry social media updates about Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion than ever go out there and do something about it.

Untitled (c.1947-49)

Joropo (c.1947-49)

Okay! Making a painting is hardly direct action but Luchita Hurtado is ninety-eight years old. I'll have more to say about the birth of children and the potential death of the planet later but first let's travel back over seventy years to Hurtado's first flowering as an artist.

Born in 1920 in Maiquetia on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, she moved first to Mexico (where she met with Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Rufino Tamayo, and Edward James) and then on to San Francisco where she'd hobnob with Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell. But she never really threw her lot in with the Abstract Expressionists in America or the Surrealists in Mexico.

She remained too singular an artist for that and even though you can make out, quite easily, elements of both styles at I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn (the title of the Serpentine Sackler show) neither comes to dominate. It's, remarkably, her first solo exhibition in a public institution anywhere in the world so it's important that the plurality of her oeuvre is established.

The Serpentine Sackler is not a huge space but it's just about the right size to get across that plurality and an anti-clockwise stroll around an exhibition that's hung, roughly, in chronological order gives you a chance to warm to Hurtado's work. These are not paintings, drawings, and prints that hit you with the blunt emotional force of a hammer but ones that slowly, and surely, seduce you with their beauty and beguilement.

Untitled (c.1947-49)

Earlier works show Hurtado finding her feet, experimenting wildly with form, material, and subject matter. One of her earliest desires was to paint fire and in many ways fire, as with the other classical elements of water, earth, and air, provides a chance to paint both abstract and figurative work at the same time.

Squaring the circle if you will. While some works are clearly based on the human form (there's a wonderful inky wash of a pensive downcast looking figure) and others can only be read as abstract patterns, there's a huge section in the middle of this Venn diagram that includes works that mix both styles (the foetus in the womb is surrounded by geometric lines rather than amniotic fluid) and ones, like the 1967 untitled work below, that could be read either way.

It could be simply a nice pattern. Or it could be a close up of flora. As Hurtado's career developed lines were drawn and emboldened between her abstract and her figurative artworks. She continued, also, to push forward with experimentation in styles and employed cut up techniques and translucent paint to create art that looked as if it could come from prehistoric cave paintings as surely as it could the ateliers of a classical French watercolourist.

Untitled (c.1967)

Untitled (c.1960)

Untitled (c.1961)

Untitled (WOMB) (c.1970s)

Untitled (EVE) (c.1970s)

Fragmented text based works riffing on the myth of biblical creation gave way to raw, acrylic paint and unprimed canvas before Hurtado returned to her safe place of brightly coloured, boldly delineated, highly decorative, and powerfully expressive abstract patterns.

Not safe as in scared to take risks. But safe because it seemed to be what she was doing best. Perhaps this gave her the confidence to finally start naming some of her works. Orinoco references the enormous river that flows through the country of her birth (though The Wombles books were already out so who knows) and Face of Arcimboldo nods towards the Milan painter famous for imagining, and painting, heads consisting entirely of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and books.

Untitled (EVE) (c.1970s)

Untitled (ADAM) (c.1970s)

Untitled (1971-74)

Untitled (c.1965)

Orinoco (1973)

Face for Arcimboldo (1973)

It is, in fact, within these works we can find the reason for the title of the exhibition. A partial recreation of a self-organised exhibition at the Los Angeles Women's Building in 1974, the lines and geometric shapes that make up the works above and below consisted of fragmented lettering that reconfigured would spell out 'I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn'.

Hippy! But not just a hippy. Hurtado was trying to make a point, a fairly obscurantist one it can't be denied, about the gaps between thought and expression, the limitations of language, and even, perhaps, the inability for one person to ever truly, deeply, understand another. Born a Spanish speaker and learning English later in life, she noticed that her children flipped easily between the two languages as and when the situation required. It made her think about how some languages can express ideas that others struggle to and how that affects they way we communicate with one another.

Earth & Sky (1973)

Self-Portrait (1973)

Untitled (1973)

Untitled (Self-portrait) (c.1968)

Art, of course, should be the great leveller. No linguistic skill whatsoever is required to read a painting. That's why earlier altarpieces contained Christian instruction that those who were unable to read would be able to follow. Messages we'd now need conveying by holy books or information boards next to the work to explain what it all means.

A portrait, or self-portrait, is fairly easy to read too. At least on the surface. Oftentimes faces, and thus portraits, can be quite inscrutable. As Luchita Hurtado's art shifted towards more representational work during the sixties she too branched out into portraits and there's a few on show at the Serpentine Sackler.

They're painted as if in a mirror (which makes a lot of sense) or even as if she's looking down from a great height at herself which gives the image objectivity while, at the same time, making it hard to decipher. It's as if Hurtado has viewed her own face both as passionately, and conversely as dispassionately, as she's viewed an apple or a trio of pears.

Untitled (1971)

Which is to say, she's done it very well. These are celebrations of the ordinary. The prosaic items of everyday life celebrated and painted with both clarity and passion. The golden flesh and the temptation of a juicy red apple suggest delicious carnal pleasure or even the delight of forbidden fruit but these works could also be read as a glorification of domestic bliss.

Unsocked toes caressing intricately patterned rugs and carpets. It made me want to visit Hurtado's house and see how's she done the place up. The rich colours firmly delineated in the background and the more expressive tones of human bodies, and fruit, to the fore. It creates a rich, and pleasing, visual experience that I found to be my personal highlight of the show.

Untitled (1970)

Encounter (1971)

Untitled (c.1970)

Untitled (c.1976)

Untitled (c.1970s)

Not that any of it was bad. Hurtado painted her 'moth lights' paintings in the seventies with the intention of rendering light on canvas so vividly that it would attract moths. This 'attempt to capture intangible energy' looks back to earlier attempts at painting fire and even further back to artists who mastered the painting of light like Joseph Wright of Derby, JMW Turner, and even, at a push, Caravaggio.

The 'moth lights', all orifice, space, and possibility, were soon followed by the 'sky skin' paintings. Hurtado had looked down at her rugs and carpets, and even herself, and was now looking upwards. Towards the sky. The eternal possibilities presented by the endless blue. She saw similarities between the natural world and our corporeality.

Titles like 'The Umbilical Cord of the Earth is the Moon' suggest a piece of new age music composed by someone like Laraaji or Mike Oldfield and the paintings themselves are likely to divide critics as surely as new age music did and does. Is it all a load of old hippy bollocks or can we really transcend and elevate our circumstances by the use of art and music.

I'd like to think it was the latter. As a man who grew up to the soundtrack of punk and new wave it's been a long and often complicated journey to reach a point where I can actually turn off the lights, whack on some Stars of the Lid or some William Basinski, and drift away to the sound of repetition and minimalist drones. It's probably the nearest I get to any form of meditation. At least now I'm not pounding the treadmill regularly.

The Umbilical Cord of the Earth is the Moon (1977)

I digress. Massively. The links that Hurtado made between nature and our bodies have continued apace during the last forty or so years of her working life. There are the images of birthing that complete this review, that initially, in some cases, could be easily mistaken for landscapes. Breasts, knees, and pregnant stomachs all stand in for hills and mountains and I assume that golden orb appearing between the mother's legs is the sun rather than a gynaecologist (or an eager cunnilinguist)!

Most likely it's both! It's no surprise that someone so drawn to the creation of new life should be so concerned with the damage we're doing to our home planet. Hurtado has spoken of feeling a great responsibility towards the planet and her most recent series, Ecology, is her passionate attempt to persuade us to get involved in improving things.

Truth be told, they're not her best works, there's something a little too naive about them, almost as if made by a righteously angry placard wearing protestor or student. But that's not to negate the power of Hurtado's message, or Greta Thunberg's message, or Greenpeace's message, or George Monbiot's message, or even Extinction Rebellion's message. Some of us may not like the way they do things but we're starting to talk about climate change in a way we haven't before. In a way that is very necessary.

There will always be those that dispute the truth of climate change (just as holocaust deniers and flat Earthers still exist) but the evidence is overwhelming and virtually every serious scientist agrees that we are on the brink of major catastrophe. Luchita Hurtado richly deserved this long overdue retrospective but I can't help thinking she'd be far more impressed if people were provoked into making the serious changes required to ensure the future of the planet she's spent nearly one hundred years living on.

But don't do it for Luchita Hurtado, don't do it for yourself, do it for the children. Not the fictional ones being born in Hurtado's paintings but your children, your friends' children, the children you don't even know, and the children who haven't even been born yet. Luchita Hurtado, to paraphrase the exhibition's title, has lived, she will die, and though I don't believe in reincarnation, I believe she can, in a way, be reborn by people interacting with her art. When the planet dies, however, it dies forever.