Keaton Henson's Almost Beautiful at Lawrence Alkin Gallery
The musician's London solo show set patient pencil drawings against deliberate damage: poured paint, ink and lines of self-defeating text.
Most people who knew Keaton Henson’s name in early 2016 knew it from records. Almost Beautiful, his solo show at the Lawrence Alkin Gallery at 42 New Compton Street, WC2, from 19 February to 12 March 2016, is a reminder that he started out as an illustrator and still treats drawing as the place for what he cannot sing.
Drawn carefully, then spoiled
The new mixed-media pieces deal with stories left untold, with solitude, with damage buried badly and with the ruin of something lovely. Henson’s subject is the English habit of holding feelings in and what that costs later. Each work begins as a fine, slow pencil drawing. He then attacks it, either with a burst of ink or a pour of black and cream paint, or with a line of sour text across the image. In The Banquet a man under moonlight, visibly wounded and scarred, has his face lost beneath a spreading mass of paint.
Henson has explained the method as a contradiction built in on purpose. Pencil gives the images a softness at odds with the pain in them; the poured paint is the pain getting out anyway, as it does in life, and sitting in front of everyone as a dark hole. The text pieces work the same way through negativity instead of mess, like looking at a lovely view and being unable to take it in because of the noise in your own head.
He has spoken openly about anxiety and about how uncomfortable he is being looked at, and the portraits carry that: many of the sitters seem to be working hard not to meet the viewer’s eye.
The day job
Henson calls music his day job. He paid for his first album, Dear…, with illustration work and recorded it alone in his bedroom in Richmond. Home-made videos found an audience online, BBC Radio 1 picked him up, and he went on to publish Gloaming, a graphic novel without words, to play after-hours concerts in English museums, and to make Birthdays in Los Angeles. Later he toured churches and cathedrals, and released the instrumental Romantic Works.
At the time of the show he was completing another album, scoring the BBC’s film of the ballet Young Men, and preparing two books: Idiot Verse, his poems, and Five Years of Favour, which gathers sheet music and drawings. Critics have called his writing uncomfortably candid. In songs and drawings alike he returns to lost love, withdrawal and deep anxiety, and to a suburban England where something strange is hidden behind the hedges.