Happy Hour

Their greatest pleasure was to forget together, that is to say to indulge in distractions. They loved drinking, in the first place, and they drank a lot, often, together. They were habitués of 'Harry's New York Bar', denizens of Rue Daunou, frequenters of the cafés in the Palais-Royale arcades, of 'Le Balzar', of 'Lipp', and a few other bars. They liked Munich beer, Guinness, gin, hot or cold punch, fruit liqueurs. Sometimes they spent whole evenings just drinking, huddled round two tables put together for the purpose, and they would talk, interminably, about the life they would have liked to lead, about the books they would write one day, about the things they would like to do, about the films they had seen or were going to see, the future of humanity, the political situation, their next holiday, their last holiday, an outing to the country, a short trip to Bruges, Antwerp or Basel.

- Georges Perec, Things, A Story of the Sixties (1978)

In 1969, Christopher Finch wrote of the 'ironic gap' that exists in Patrick Caulfield's paintings 'between what is represented and the representation'. 1 In the 30 years that have passed, Caulfield's work has evolved and expanded yet his repertoire of images, like his artistic output, has continued to be limited - but not limiting. His commonplace interiors and objects are endlessly reinvented and recycled: bars, restaurants, wine glasses and bottles, displays of food and flowers look like images from an old cookery magazine. As early as 1964, David Thompson characterised Caulfield's motifs as 'culturally devalued', defining the term as 'pictorial matter ... which has lost its original virtue because it has become either vulgarised or dated, and is now, as "content", inert'. 2

Caulfield is often aligned with British Pop artists such as Hockney, Jones and Kitaj, who, like himself, attended the Royal College of Art in 1960. His preoccupation with the still life and the endless range of vessel-like containers within them, however, more properly links him to the tradition of Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. Indeed, Caulfield's 1963 Portrait of Juan Gris pays homage to his artistic mentor, incorporating the decorative elements of Gris' late work to frame his icon like a set of inverted commas, whilst inscribing himself within Gris' aesthetic legacy. One can also trace Léger's influence in Caulfield's bold graphic outlining of forms, objects and figures, a style of flat diagrammatic organisation that, by the mid-80s, was cast aside in favour of more abstracted compositions. Caulfield's iconography is not related to brand-name consumer culture per se, but rather to a culture that is debased and slightly outmoded. His work is an index of anonymous settings filled with generic objects of displaced desire.

On a trip to Crete in 1960, Caulfield acquired some postcards featuring excavated Minoan frescos. He soon realised that they were reproductions, but decided that 'although the images were invented they were also accurate ... I felt that even if the murals did not exist in their original form it was likely that the paint was applied in flat areas, so that the interpretation on the postcards was probably accurate and what you had was flat areas of colour and linear imagery.' 3 Caulfield's reading of the postcards informed his work both aesthetically and conceptually. His description of their formal qualities could easily apply to his own work, and the notion of an 'accurate' fiction anticipates Caulfield's manipulation of photorealist detail, with its potential to undermine the hierarchies of pictorial convention in order to create perceptual sense.

In Caulfield's paintings of the early 60s, such as Still Life on a Table (1964) or Earthenware (1966), decorative pots, jugs and jars become ciphers of forlorn exotica. Guitar and Rug (1968) depicts a rolled-up, fringed rug supporting an empty wine bottle and guitar, rendered in shades of Mediterranean aqueous blue. The black-outlined objects evoke a kind of bohemian still life, until one realises the spatial impossibility of the vertical bottle against the diagonal of the guitar. Here, the 'ironic gap' referred to by Finch short-circuits the expressiveness of the portrait.

In Window at Night (1969) we look up at an angle towards the interior of an anonymous room through a window. A red lamp hangs from the ceiling, shedding a yellow light. We are permitted entry into the space through an open window frame. The space around the window, the grid between the panes and the leaves of a plant are silhouetted against the warm orange interior. The flatness of the oil paint conspires with the oblique, if not baroque, sense of space, artfully crafted through a layering of lines and grids. With a minimal range of colours and economy of means, Caulfield creates a characterless scene for a projected narrative fragment. The painting rehearses one of Caulfield's most innovative painterly conceits: the illusion of interior space through the depiction of artificial light.

Caulfield's work suggests a kind of vicarious tourism bound up in the notion of leisure time. The idea of foreign culture, of the 'continental', is always framed at a double remove. It is envisioned and painted as a cliché - one that trades in its own knowing familiarity as an object of consumption. This self-referential world is constructed through details painted in a contrasting style of brushwork. Unlike the flat impermeable application of paint he so skilfully employs, these lodged images of 'culture' are rendered in photorealist fashion, upsetting the pictorial intelligibility of perspective in the image. Here they are deployed as a quotations, projections of fantasy, like the Spoleto Cathedral in Office Party (1977), painted as a shimmering photographic surface, or the Technicolor chateau in After Lunch (1975). The photorealist detail becomes a kind of passive consumption, much like the

idea of travelling without having to take the trip itself. Think, for instance, of the protagonist of J-K Huysmans' Against Nature (1884), who was able to experience the 'Englishness' of England simply by dining on English food in a Parisian railway station restaurant. Even the titles of Caulfield's paintings - Bistro (1970), Tandoori Restaurant (1971) or Villa Plage (1970) - evoke an exhausted mythology of exotic locales.

This disruption in the paintings is recast in Caulfield's later works which further confound the 'truth' of the image. Abstraction and realism are collapsed through incongruous colour combinations to produce vibrant decorative juxtapositions. Kitsch, boldly patterned surfaces undermine conventional illusionist space. In Town and Country (1979), a sickly variety of 60s patterned surfaces decorate the corner space of a restaurant, wildly contrasting with the wood-grained surfaces and the window in the picture, through which a crudely painted sylvan view can be seen. Into this outdoor scene extends the side of the building, on which hangs a sign reading 'Salads'. The hysterical patterns articulate severely oblique angles, reverberating space. Even the wood laminate is rendered as a trompe-l'oeil synthetic simulation of itself: why paint a brick wall when you can paint brick wallpaper?

In Wine Bar (1983), the space is modelled from abstract forms, which, through the filter of choreographed light and shadow, create objects such as the de rigueur Chianti bottles recycled as candle lamps. In contrast, the ghastly prawn salad in the lower centre of the picture is painted in a realist fashion similar to the decor that frames the scene with potted plants, a metal pitcher and a painting cantilevered off the wall. The word 'quiche' - the epitome of tasteful 70s 'Frenchness' - is here rendered in photorealist fashion as chalk on a blackboard announcing the dish of the day.

Many of Caulfield's paintings are about time off and the intervals between times. The settings and the objects he depicts often suggest things beyond their time or a sense of shop-worn cliché. In the pictures of empty restaurants and bars, time stands still. Either we are between meals, or the paintings describe a business' worst nightmare: no customers. Paradise Bar (1974) and the more recent and less realist works, like Lunch-time (1985), depict places in which people and noise are conspicuously absent - there is a sense of overwhelming silence. A feeling of restlessness pervades these images, of waiting for something to happen, of the tyranny of time.

From the late 80s to the present, Caulfield has greatly pared down his pictorial lexicon. The idea of the space 'between what is represented and the representation' is made more problematic in paintings such as Happy Hour (1996). Here, objects seem to float in space. Shadows become objects, while objects morph into the shadows. The blackened, maroon-coloured ground manipulates space in concert with light sources that play upon the truthful accuracy of fiction. A black lamp is superimposed over an inverted dispersion of light, which is in turn surrounded by an abstract, glowing red shape. At the centre of the image, five wine bottles cast shadows from another mysterious light source. Next to the bottles, a glass of red wine hangs in space, or rather, outside it. It is rendered in a photorealist manner which complicates the viewer's reading of the picture: the wine glass exists outside the painting's internal logic, floating like a spectre just above the picture plane. The resultant psychological gap aggravates the screen of ironic distance, which is in turn punctured by a detail within a detail: the convex surface of the wine glass contains a 'reflection' of Caulfield himself.

Framed by a window-shaped white light, the exit sign located at the upper-left corner of the painting announces a form of escape from the loneliness of the empty bar, a metaphorical recessed space beyond life's perpetual happy hour. Caulfield's paintings of domestic interiors, bars and restaurants betray a received notion of good taste, a knowing sophistication whereby covetable objects, like an Eames chair, or the exoticism of foreign cuisine are considered posh. From the vantage point of the late 90s, these outmoded commodities are once again objects of desire, like the reinvention of the traditional British pub and the minimalist interiors of the 60s and 70s now found in Wallpaper magazine. Caulfield's paintings shore up this type of conspicuous consumption without repudiating it: his images are sites of consumption in which a plate of food or glass of wine is always on offer.