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Having set up these constrictions of size and solidity, Hodgkin then pushes against them as hard as he can, and the tension that results can be magic: small panels with huge brushstrokes, subtle and fleeting effects of glaze and scumble contrasting with the rigidity of their support, and frames (with frames of paint inside, as well) that squeeze speckled, color-saturated vistas into distant postcards. The window effect isn't just a mannerism. It speaks of a certain anxiety, the desire to guard memory in the act of revealing it: "The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey," Hodgkin once remarked, "the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact."
Since the late 1960s, Hodgkin's images have had a pronounced architectural character, influenced by Fernand Leger's "tubism" as well as by Vuillard. Grantchester Road, 1975, is an interior with a fireplace, and the indoor plants are of the same pictorial species as the green spreading palms in Hodgkin's Indian paintings. The separation of room and gaze gives Hodgkin's work its basic trope, that of peeping and peering--from culture (the room) into nature (everything else) and back again. It's not about seeing here and now but about the memory of having seen; not complete and ordered possession of a sight but the turbulence of memory, inflected with a sense of loss at its elusiveness.
Hodgkin's complete originality is in his color, which, as art historian Michael Auping says in the catalog, "has a strange quality of simultaneously seeming totally invented, yet completely natural." Its reds and lemon yellows, its blackened viridians and fiercely luminous blues, its swoony Whistlerian grays are like no other color in modern painting. They give his work a perverse to-and-fro between the intimate and the operatic--Aida done in a marionette theater. Such color isn't just showy. It can be extremely tender, intelligently seductive, in the way that art has every right to be. It also insists on distinction--the need to feel one thing at a time, and to remember not what it looked like but what it felt like. Hodgkin's shapes may be nebulous, but his feelings, or so the paintings persuade you, seldom are.