JOHN NOEL SMITH – Didymus / Multipolar / Passage

"This book covers mainly the last two decades of Smith’s work, a period in which he has continued to develop his distinctive style. His work is still rich texturally, and reflective and analytical in nature. He creates rhythms and irregular patterns, while celebrating the language of painting. His most recent works are perhaps the most complex so far in terms of colour and composition. These paintings are about the relationship and tension between their parts ... The paintings of John Noel Smith can be seen as au- tonomous realities, but surely they also inhabit the world beyond, their style being means rather than end." 

— from the introduction by Enrique Juncosa 

"Throughout all the metamorphoses of his style, Smith has never seriously deviated significantly from his commitment to abstract art, and continues to produce series of paintings that have a consistency in terms of their intensity and quality. He is constantly pushing his talent, and surveys his own work with a critical eye, assessing and recalibrating his practice, with the bar set exceptionally high. If one was to view Smith’s entire oeuvre in sequence and in its totality, one observes that elements of his vocabulary of motifs and patterns may feature, but always in a new guise and with different permutations. There is an original or unexpected element to discern in each new work and it never becomes formulaic. These visual links and points of references serve almost as anchor points to the works that went before, but a progression in his distinctive vocabulary becomes apparent. Although the artist produces drawings, which he describes as cursory and spontaneous, these are kept private, and serve as a mental notation to himself as to the sequence of thoughts in terms of how his work evolves. 
          Smith works in series, and these can include smaller single panels or larger diptychs, triptychs or polyptychs. There is an enveloping and mesmerizing quality to Smith’s canvases, in particular when working on a large scale. Scale alters the viewer’s relationship with an artwork, and with Smith’s large paintings the spectator cannot take the painting in with a single glance, but must experience it not as simply an object on a wall, but as an environment in itself. Furthermore, there is no central point of attention in Smith’s canvases. He emphasises the importance of coalescence and coherence in his work, stating "My stratagem is to shift the emphasis away from a single, central, dominant idea to a flotilla of interrelated fluid concepts, which add up to a Gesamtbild, one which is about potential cohesion and lucidity as opposed to fragmentation and incoherence, hopefully recovering a sense of integrity in the process." 

 —  from the essay by Margarita Cappock