Catalogue extracts and published comments

Born in 1946, the self taught son of Jewish émigrés, and only finally taking up painting full time after a career as a criminal barrister, the still life, street scenes and conversation pieces that predominate throughout his work speak of largely figurative almost narrative concerns.  And yet the more you look into them the more you become aware of their painterly preoccupations, the dense, rich materiality of their surfaces.  The huge diversity of his artistic concerns and subject matter are held together in an entirely consistent voice.  And what a range of interests they are, a life time of looking at paintings that started as a teenager in the National Gallery – Early Italian in particular, one suspects – and going on to encompass the Neo-Romanticism of Minton, Colquhoun and McBride, the industrial scenes and images of ordinary everyday life embodied in the paintings a photographs of the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s, the vivid, gritty imagery of the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s among them.  The outcome is paintings imbued with real emotional weight and substance by the quiet truthfulness of the marks and surfaces through which they are formed.

Nicholas Usherwood, Galleries Magazine 

—

Simon Quadrat’s paintings elicit sharp observation with many of his street scenes and still-life studies showing references to childhood and memories.  His work is eclectic and diverse, from still life with familiar objects on tables, to more abstract places which include the sea and some beautifully encapsulated landscape scenes.  The subject matter is almost always recognisable but often with a dimension beyond the every day.

Source material comes from his imagination, memories of people, places and incidents from several decades.  The subjects evolve on the canvas as he works on them. A street scene that may or may not have existed, a figure who might be someone he knows or once saw, or instead a complete imposter to reality.  His still life paintings are as much about invention as observation.  He likes to give objects a significance which they otherwise would not have.

Whether creating a painting that is recognisable or not, Simon’s preoccupation is with the paint itself or more precisely ‘with the mysterious and indefinable process of turning paint into an image, to capture some truth, energy and integrity’.

Simon is a compulsive visitor to galleries and has a special love of 20th century art from all corners of the globe.  This curiosity and knowledge can be seen in the timeless essence of his own work.

Charlotte Eager, for Six Chapel Row Gallery, Bath

—

Simon Quadrat taught himself to paint in his twenties, mainly by rushing over to the London art galleries and museums whenever he had a spare hour.  The design and astonishing humanity of early Sienese paintings echo throughout his work.  However, it is the modern British and European paintings of the pre and post war period that resonate most clearly.  His palette of colours, together with his technique of putting on paint and scraping it back, create a sense of history within the painting where figures may be half painted out and every area of colour has depth and energy to it. 

‘I often feel so terribly sorry for the people in my paintings,’ he exclaims as we look at Young Woman in Cafe, a lovingly painted figure sitting anxiously all alone with her cup of tea.  

The paintings in the current show are filled with childhood delights: kite flying, caravanning, the circus, the Marionette theatre, Punch and Judy, the seaside, a bright-coloured bird in a cage, all observed with eyes that see the pleasure without missing the undertones.  In the Contented Couple, the husband sits on his chair relishing his pipe and tea, the boys are loving their kites, even the cat has an insect to play with: only the wife sits on a rock empty handed.

It seems to me that these paintings come from the subconscious.  Survivors of war carry on with the lives they find themselves living, just as we all do at any time in history.  In At the Fair, an odd-looking man approaches from the left while the woman behind the counter could be one of the targets on her brightly lit stall.  Diverse elements gather together, working to make this a moment when a man and woman look at each other and their hands don’t quite touch.

Anna Powell, Sladers Yard Gallery, for Bridport Times

—

The idea of the ability of an object to resonate traces of human life beyond its obvious function, and to contain a certain amount of poignancy, runs through all of Quadrat’s work. This can be seen in the inclusion in his paintings of such diverse objects as a broken typewriter that has seen a long life of action, an antique hurricane lamp, packaging from times gone by, 50’s billboard posters, old shop fronts or even an empty bench within a communal suburban garden. The artist has an unerring ability to reveal something of the beauty and value to be found in the everyday and commonplace. 

Quadrat’s interiors often include large, flat expanses of shimmering light tones at times reminding us of the atmosphere of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings. Importantly, this spare treatment of areas of his picture surfaces heightens the presence of some wonderful little details within the paintings. Without the sheer size of the dull grey walls or bright white table tops in the backgrounds of these pictures our eyes would not be able to focus with such confidence on the extreme detail of such objects as a long, thin, black bladed knife, a delicate flute or a perfect feather. It is this wilful manipulation of the viewer’s eye that shows Quadrat to be a remarkably clever translator of the visual. He is an experienced and sensitive witness to the strange, quirky and natural beauty of everyday scenes and combinations of objects. 

There are, in Quadrat’s paintings, examples of little nods and the occasional knowing homage to artists that he admires. Always the most gentle of expressions these can be found, for example, in the placing of a pile of sunflowers on a draining board reminding us of a familiar prop used by that great ‘Kitchen Sink’ painter John Bratby. Alternatively, hanging on the wall within one of Quadrat’s interior scenes, we might see a beautiful little rendition of a male nude found on close inspection to bear an uncanny resemblance to an image by the celebrated figure and landscape painter Keith Vaughan.

In his still-lives and interiors Quadrat plays freely with, at times, quite unnatural combinations of viewpoints. Cezanne was arguably the first artist to use what became known as ‘shifting perspective’ and it was his experiments with describing simple objects as if one was walking around them noting how they looked from different angles which proved to be the lead for the Cubists’ discoveries of the early 1900’s. Quadrat’s playfulness in this respect is, however, tempered by his ability to underpin every one of his compositions with a perfect distribution of related shapes within the boundaries of his chosen support. Put another way; the artist has a considerable talent for understanding pictorial design.

Like other artists before him Quadrat has been touched by the transience of people and places and is choosing to play his part in documenting some of the residue of more simple, parochial and less global times.  

Henry Garfit for James Huntington-Whiteley 

—

Over the years that Simon has been exhibiting with us his approach to painting has slowly evolved while his subject matter has remained eclectic and unpredictable.  There are now fewer still lives, rather more colour and a stronger human presence. His painting is founded in memory, imagination and numerous cultural references, both British and European.  The need to put a human perspective into his paintings has grown with time.  Each painting seeks to tell a story but it is a story which is deliberately ambiguous and one left to the viewer to determine.  His paintings are rooted, without any sense of nostalgia, in the 20th century but his recurring themes of companionship and isolation are timeless.  Simon Quadrat’s paintings draw the viewer with their arresting imagery but it is their depth which repays repeated viewing.

Matthew Hall, Panter and Hall

—