Under Cover

A thematic hang of the work of Geoffrey Rigden (1943-2016) highlights pre-occupations that developed over decades, often concurrently, showing the influence of Indian and Persian miniatures, Cycladic sculpture, Archaic Cypriot artefacts, early Italian painting and an array of other ingredients that went into his creative soup pot to ‘cook’, as he put it.

From the large-scale flat abstraction produced as a student at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, to the late domestic-sized works that combined more complex space with personal iconography, all were underpinned by looking, understanding and making. It was a process that often required a very long simmer.

He always favoured crepuscular light rather than daytime glare, with working hours continuing after sunset. Radical transformations could occur overnight, eventually followed by a unifying final layer of paint that barely concealed substrata of facture. The critic Tim Hilton discerned a tenebrous streak in Rigden, describing him as ‘not so much idiosyncratic as ahead of us all…a dark artist’, while the collector Tom Bendhem likened some of the paintings to caged animals that, if provoked, might drag the viewer through the bars to an uncertain fate.

The young Geoffrey was brought up with an awareness of the precariousness of life and the fatal consequences of war – his father, uncle and grandfather were all casualties, and his childhood imagination was fuelled by the knowledge that his father had been involved in RAF Special Operations, parachuting secret agents into Europe. The artist’s abiding fascination with subterfuge, spies and UFOs gives a clue to the origins of the compellingly enigmatic quality that pervades the work, one made more intriguing by its deadpan humour.