Gavin Nolan: A King's Gambit Accepted

The highly promising figurative artist Gavin Nolan displays his grotesque but captivating portraits at a month-long solo show at Hoxton gallery Charlie Smith. A King's Gambit Accepted is a study of famous historical figures who either committed suicide or were killed, exploring how the nature of a person's death can eventually define their life. Inspiration came, curiously enough, from an eighteenth-century chess-playing machine known as The Turk, which was in fact an elaborate hoax. One of the most graphic paintings depicts the British painter Robert Benjamin Haydon, who, in a prolonged and bloody affair, rather cack-handedly shot himself and cut his own throat twice before finally breathing his last breath. (Not the route-one way to suicidal checkmate, that's for sure.) Other notable characters include Hitler, Socrates, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemmingway. The collection of pictures is disturbing and alluring at the same time - especially for Nolan's close friends, family and loved-ones, many of whom will see their own exaggerated characteristics, like those of the artist himself, peer out from the canvass, as if imprisoned by a cruel fate that is not theirs. Keeping in line with death as a leitmotif, the eerie mouths of Nolan's pawns are often distorted, blood red and appear to be emitting a slight swell of smoke; perhaps a sign of their souls escaping en route to perpetual torment, or a reference to a smoking barrel of a gun - or even, simply, the subconscious mind of a nicotine-fuelled artist at work.