John Hurrell – 20 February, 2026

In Anthony’s Great North Rd venue, very private diagrammatic symbols (hints of Miro) are presented by Julian Hooper within nine surrealist paintings. Four are on canvas, using acrylic — the rest on paper.

These paintings are quite graphic in the sense that they are amusing, thin-lined, cartoonish drawings in white paint on dry-brushed black backgrounds. Or the reverse. Elegant black-lined drawings on raw canvas. Very pale buff duck.

Attempt to decode them if you dare. Especially if you like searching for messages: but would you do that for Miro or Dali? These are spell-bindingly enigmatic, not lacking in confidence or incidentally, ornate spiral-scrolled decoration. Drawn perhaps to appeal to those who, like me, love comics and cartoons, having an unabashed yuk-yuk (ie. juvenile) sensibility.

Carefully made, and precise, they nevertheless have an appealing looseness—despite being graphic; a relaxed chortling sensibility you might say. There is much formality on the pictureplane, but no tightness, with curvaceous signs or tropes that resemble musical staves, profiled views of scattered macaroni, rolled up strips, links of chains, propellors, moths, hooks and spread out geometric faces.

They are like trippy-dippy musical scores written on parallel notational bands. As if they were some zany sonatas rendered by Saul Steinberg, perhaps. Slightly wacky, but not wacko stoner; loving clarity, not fragmentation or muddled disintegration.

We see exuberance, not didacticism…with heaps of whimsey. With also an affinity to Denys Watkins, Grant Takle and other slyly droll sensibilities. A love of the canvas surface and higgledy-piggledy bits of geo and botany to coat it.

John Hurrell

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