"The Anatomy of Ease", essay for Jeremy Moon:  A Retrospective, catalogue
by Martin Coomer, 2001

At the memorial exhibition for Jeremy Moon, held at the Rowan Gallery in 1974, thirty of Moon's contemporaries (including Patrick Caulfield, Anthony Caro, Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, Phillip King, Kenneth Noland, and Bridget Riley) exhibited their work alongside his.  The exhibition was not only a tribute to the much-admired painter but also a testament to the enormous impact Moon had on his contemporaries.  It now seems wholly appropriate to discuss Moon's paintings with reference to artists working today, some of who were mere infants when Moon's life was cut tragically short.  For the spirit of his generous abstraction lives way beyond historical pigeon-holing and in a far deeper sense than a fashionable sixties or seventies retro 'look' that has come to the fore in recent years.

The links between Moon's paintings and those being made by the artists of today exist in the very basics of the painter's lexicon.  Squares, grids and stripes; these are - and have been for decades - the store-cupboard ingredients of the abstract painter's life.  Even in his early work we witness Moon's desire to take these basic forms and tweak and tinker with them so that the seemingly self-evident is enriched with a myriad of sensations and associations.  We need only look at Garland and Eclipse (both works from 1962) to see how the flatness of his images and their apparent stability is challenged.  In Garland, Moon makes mischief with a fluctuating ribbon of paint, a loop of imperfection that meanders over a seriously dark background.  The effect is expanded further still in Eclipse, where the central motif battles against a ground composed of optically fizzing, diagonal stripes.  Things seem about to topple; in apparent stasis there is great movement.

Almost everything about Moon's paintings from the early 1960s cdan be described in purely formal terms.  There are bands of colour, grids and discs.  Paint is generally applied flatly, colour is towards high key and unmodulated.  Emphatic, but never coldly so, his simple, reductivist geometry unleashes its' unexpected multiplicity of configurations.

We are currently enjoying what might be described as a new optimism in painting.  But the return to painting, particularly abstract painting, over the past few years has thrown up many new challenges to artists.  How can painters today make these age-old forms a viable means of expression?  While the references may have changed, the perception and illusion of space - and movement - on a fixed, two-dimensional surface, persists as strongly now as ever.  Complicated by our multi-tasking eye, bastardized (some would say trivialised, through the seamless crossovers between art, style and fashion, but present all the same.

Daniel Sturgis has made a series of paintings using a limited number of motifs - small, overlapping discs that read as Pop Art-ish petals and circles of colour that are joined to for bead-like lengths - that cover or partly fill expanses of unmodulated acrylic paint.  Like Moon, Sturgis has a love of the seemingly self-evident, a deadpan approach to colour and form.  What Sturgis seems to play with, however, is pure visibility - retinal impact - and split-second historicising.  With their happy, homely mixes of colours and snazzy designs, these friendly paintings live for the present but have one eye trained firmly on the past.

A similar mood infiltrates Sybille Berger's stripe paintings.  Composed of thick horizontal bands of paint, these deceptively simple abstracts are steeped in the language of post-painterly abstraction, but their tension lies between their high-art aspiration and their familiarity to us through in-store décor and the fashion spread.  They sit in uncertain territory between tongue-in-cheek camp and pure, cold reductivism.

It is no criticism to say that compared to so much po-faced, high-minded abstraction of the period, Moon's work is deeply human, humorous even.  How can we fail to read the brightly coloured diamond and sausage shapes in Moon's Cypher (1963) as anything other a grinning face:  these paintings don't merely toy with the figurative/abstract debate, they give hard-edged abstraction a happy face.  There is also a deliberate hand-made quality to some of Moon's early paintings that, up-close, lends a humanising influence.  Fascinated by the notion of labour, many artists today are favouring the hand-made over the pristine, impenetrable surfaces of recent years.  Just as in his early work, Moon does not seem overtly concerned with making a seamless finish, Peter Davies fills his grand designs with traces of human activity.  In works such as Small Touching Squares Painting (1998), there is a strong element of filling-in.  Stand back and the effect of this mammoth canvas is akin to a computer-simulated model.  Up close, however, we see the many unforced errors made by colouring-in the thousands of tiny squares that fall across the three large panels.  As we fluctuate between the two reading, we become aware of the painting as a living, breathing object.

By the mid 1960s, Moon's work takes a further twist in the form of shaped canvases, often incorporating two or more panels.  Battenburg and Golden Section (both 1968) consist of identically shaped canvases that are created by the appearance of two planes that abut at a 120-degree angle.  A reassuring grid of coloured squares covers the surface of Battenburg, but where the angles meet, the sense of symmetry is thrown sharply off kilter.  With its more irregular design, Golden Section draws even more attention to the diagonal axis so that it appears to be spatially imprecise.  We can see this effect pushed to a vertiginous extreme in the recent paintings of Sarah Morris.  Inspired by the glitzy facades of Las Vegas hotels, Morris covers her canvases with a series of multi-perspective, overlapping grids.  These neon-coloured collisions occur on the same picture plance, giving the impression of driving through a city at night.

Though Moon always worked in series, the sense of improvisation within the self-imposed limits is most strongly felt in his grid paintings of 1969-1970.  Here the format consists of either squares or rectangles of stained-glass colour, separated by a grid of broad lines.  These are paintings that demand to be seen en-masse so that the nuances of rippling colour can work their magic.  Richard Kirwan also knows about the discipline of working in series.  He has pursued a variety of series in simultaneous development, not with a rigid or didactic obsessiveness, but as a continuing investigation into assumptions often made concerning issues of 'pure' painting.  Whilst Kirwan's works are flatly executed using masking tape and acrylic, these lattices, grids and grilles of paint exert a strong rhythmic insistence.  The same applies for Damien Hirst's 'spot paintings' - white canvases of varying shapes and sized covered with an even grid of arbitrarily coloured circles.

Moon had a love of music, and although he was an artist keen to limit any discussion of his work to the mechanics of colour and form, there is certainly an analogy to be made with the structured composition of J.S. Bach.  Like Bach's Preludes and Fugues, there's nothing lofty about Moon's abstractions.  Hard won, they nonetheless adopt the anatomy of ease, their apparent neutrality actively encourages a range of sensations far more lasting than other supposedly more expressive paintings.  Perhaps Moon's greatest accomplishment was that whilst acknowledging the conventions of his work, he strove fearlessly to overcome them.  That the line, the grid and the square remain such a rich source for artists today is a lasting testament to Moon and his visual preoccupations during his all-too-short career.