Nicholas Hatfull: Supercafone's Autoberryblues
9th-23rd September 2007
Nicholas Hatfull approaches painting as a kind of transit zone, where the transmission of motifs into the immersive space of the picture is to maroon them in limbo. The phrase 'Supercafone's Autoberryblues' elides the themes that set the prevailing mood for the artist to play with in this new body of work. 'Supercafone' was a novelty Italian rap hit in the late Nineties, feauturing the irreverent aspirational ramblings of an uncouth 'coatto' type associated with the city's periphery. Imagining a contemplative mode of abstraction as an analogue for the blues of the 'cafone' type got things moving. 'Autoberryblues' refers to the artist's frequent starting point of shapes reformed from motorways, petrol stations and a stylised dot he considers a distant cousin of the blueberry.
Regressive tones in the work - the selection of imagery from 'Lucky Charms' cereal and 'O'boy' scandinavian chocolate milk - figure alongside insistent formal manoevuring; Forms of reduced buildings and personal pop drift among wandering abstract remarks and shifting colour fields. He comments, 'Inserting something into a painting - even a feeling - is to refresh it with opacity. You chuck motifs into this area and they're reshaped by some synthetic rain.'