In the small downstairs exhibition room at the Guildhall Art Gallery there hung till recently 27 portraits of the 2022 England football squad (and manager Gareth Southgate) by black artist Matt Small. Simplest way to introduce him and the artworks is the video:
Each portrait is extremely realistic in shape and anatomical features – so accurate in every respect that I thought they must surely be based on blown-up photographs. But then they are very freely coloured, in the manner of much modern painting, in the livid blotchy style which dates back maybe to Lucien Freud and, I suspect, has been taught at art colleges ever since.
Style
As with so much art it is one thing to see a flat image on a screen, as in this review, and quite a different thing to see the art work in the flesh. These works are not, as they appear here, flat and finished – they’re not even in one piece, they are three-dimensional assemblies or mini-sculptures.
Each portrait was painted onto some kind of plywood about half a centimetre thick, and then these were cut out to create silhouetted portraits and then glued or stuck onto the backdrops. And the backdrops aren’t just flat canvas or material. Each backing is made up of triangles of wood of different shapes and sizes, roughly sawn so they have splintered rough edges, roughly painted white so you can see the original wood colour at the edges, and assembled onto the basic base of each portrait so that the assembled triangles create a geometric pattern behind each head.
Apparently these white triangular tessalations are a kind of abstract geometric depiction of the English flag but I didn’t see that at all. Instead it struck me they look like the seams of a modern white leather football.
‘This Is England’ at Guildhall Art Gallery. Can you name all 11 players (manager Gareth Southgate being at the top left)?
If we’re being allegorical, it struck me that the way the roughly finished wooden shapes fit together so neatly symbolises the way the team, often from pretty poor backgrounds, suffering under various disadvantages (rough edges) nonetheless were arranged into patterns and shapes of tremendous beauty.
As to the faces themselves I’ve described how they have a photographic accuracy of shape, especially, for some reason, the eyes, which, in some of them, really do look like photographs until you get up close and see they’re painted like everything else.
The reproductions I’ve seen online don’t convey the impact of the actual paintings. Photos flatten colour and texture and so make them all look similar, they all look like they’ve got jet black hair and dark skin, they all look very samey, the white and the black men alike.
Phil Foden by Matt Small
In the flesh there’s much more variety. As you can see from this individual portrait of Matt Foden, the face is built up through a mosaic of surprisingly garish primary colours, including red, yellow, blue, turquoise and so on. Samey at a distance, the more you approach each individual work, the more vibrant its patchwork of vivid colouring becomes.
Second thing is the physical texture of the paintings. They’re not smooth and flat. Small has left in all the imperfections which come from splashing on pain, including brushmarks, swirls of pain, some kind of oxydising process which has produced discoloured blips and bubbles on virtually every patch.
Some people might regard these as imperfections but this is precisely the kind of record of a work’s production which has always thrilled me, ever since I saw my first Jasper John paintings 50 years ago, with their half-finished canvases and stencilled words saying ‘Fragile’, the sense that a modern painting merges into its surroundings, records and depicts the physical processes which produced it. I suppose they are signifiers of a kind of ‘authenticity’, denoting the hand-made, individual physical effort required to not only pain, but to saw out, assemble and glue together all the elements, as I mentioned above.
It’s a type of art which excites me as much as it did 50 years ago and so, on the crudest, physical, visceral level, I thrilled to the physical presence of these works, almost like being physically close to someone I’m really attracted to. Pretty much none of the physical nature of the works comes over in reproductions so you might be asking yourself what I’m on about. This is why it is still, despite everything, making the effort to try and see works of art in the flesh. It’s almost always a completely different experience from seeing any reproduction, especially on a flat 3-inch square screen of a modern smartphone.
Raheem Stirling by Matt Small
Message
Matt Small, the gallery and everyone involved is at pains to emphasise that the works as a whole have a polemical aim: this is to emphasise that the squad came from a diverse set of backgrounds, and that they not only made history (by making it further in the World Cup than any English team since 1966) and inspired the country through their teamwork and cohesion, but who also took a principled and inspiring stand on ‘equality, inclusivity and racial injustice’.
And this is all true: the team worked together not only on the pitch, supporting young wonder players like Jude Bellingham (aged 19!!!), Bukayo Saka (age 21) and Phil Foden (21) to score magnificent goals, but behaved with tremendous dignity and fluency off the pitch. Some of the after match interviews, young men pushed in front of a camera just minutes after giving their all on the biggest stage in the world, were models of politeness and articulacy.
Then individual stories like the return to form of Marcus Rashford who suffered such cruel abuse as a result of his outstanding efforts with charities to distribute over 21 million meals for children and families who might not otherwise eat – God, what an extraordinary inspiration to the whole country!
The show is accompanied by a few quotes. Gareth Southgate, measuring his words as always, says:
‘We are a team whose diversity and youth represent a modern country.”
But last word goes to Rashford, quoted as saying:
“Look what we can do when we come together.”
These portraits were created in the spring and put on display in the month before the tournament began – but little can Small or the gallery have imagined what genuinely inspiring, nation-uniting people these 27 players would turn out to be, making any English person with a soul burst with pride at these extraordinarily brilliant young men, their skill, their ambition, their commitment, and their embodiment of everything that is good about young, modern, inclusive England.
Related links
The display at the Guildhall Art Gallery has now closed.
Matt Small is represented by JG Contemporary who are planning to show some of the portraits in the National Football Museum in Manchester later this year, and selections may be displayed at other spaces later this year.
Meanwhile you can see other Matt Small artworks at the JG Contemporary Gallery in Chiswick, West London.
The National Theatre in London is going to present a new play about Gareth Southgate and the team, opening on 10 June.
Books & Boots 