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Red Hat, Red Shirt, Red Car: Storm\u2019s Coming by Eric Fischl, 2025\u00a9 Eric Fischl. Photography by Gary Mamay<\/p>\nYou can\u2019t miss it. Written in the window of the Ordovas gallery in London is the single word RED. Some exhibition titles try to entice you in. Not this one. This one feels like an instruction. Come in and see this show, it shouts. Or else.<\/p>\n
Inside, a tasty selection of modern artists can be seen putting the colour through all sorts of paces \u2014 and it made me think about how many artists favour red, and the colour\u2019s role in art.<\/p>\n
Among its many qualities, red is surprisingly adaptable. When Bridget Riley uses it in one of her stripy rainbow abstractions, it nestles quietly between blue and green, a happy colour, you feel, given a unifying role.<\/p>\n
But then the naughty surrealist Joan Mir\u00f3 gets his hands on it and gives us two cheeky biomorphs indulging in X-rated hanky-panky. The blob on the left is clearly the feminine one because Mir\u00f3 has topped one of her upper mounds with a splodge of nipple pink. But the other blob has grown something bent upwards like a banana from its lower regions. Hanging from it is a red sac coloured so brightly a baboon would be proud to sport it on its derri\u00e8re. What can it be?<\/p>\n
Red Hat, Red Shirt, Red Car: Storm\u2019s Coming by Eric Fischl, 2025\u00a9 Eric Fischl. Photography by Gary Mamay<\/p>\n
The sexiness of red is also what Eric Fischl seems to be enjoying in a Californian beach scene in which two women who have driven up in a red sports car \u2014 a little red Corvette? \u2014 slip out of their red dresses and into bikinis. But this same sexy lipstick tone becomes something militaristic and historically aggressive when Umar Rashid uses it in a faux oval \u201cofficial portrait\u201d from 1798 sported by a certain \u201cHippolyte of Gonaives, pretender to the throne of Hispaniola\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Who is this guy? Is he a goody or a baddy? Judging by his eye-catching red uniform he must be a figure from the colonial era. And something about that militaristic red coat tells me immediately he\u2019s up for the fight.<\/p>\n
All this is enjoyable. The dozen examples gathered here of the different uses of red in contemporary art prompt you to notice colouristic issues that might otherwise pass you by. But there\u2019s a problem. So effective is the show at encouraging colouristic thoughts that after five minutes my imagination forgot the exhibition and began ranging across the whole of art history searching for telling reds.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first image that loomed up, unstoppably, was Titian\u2019s huge Assumption of the Virgin in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. Designed to be seen from way back in this looming church, high above the altar, almost 25ft tall, Titian\u2019s biggest painting is a spectacular tribute to the eye-catching power of red.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Titian\u2019s The Assumption of the Virgin puts both the Virgin Mary and God in redAlamy<\/p>\n
The Virgin Mary is on her way to heaven. Usually in art she wears celestial blue, but in this instance Titian has given her something scarlet to ascend in, a dress of striking red made more thrilling still by the golden sunlight streaming in through the window behind.<\/p>\n
Above her, the waiting God the Father is also in red. Below her, the most prominent of the apostles waving her goodbye are in matching crimson. In his Frari masterpiece, in a spectacular ascent through several red layers, Titian puts the sexiness of red at the thunderous service of the church.<\/p>\n
That, though, is not what Van Gogh does in his edgy nocturnal interior of the night caf\u00e9 in Arles, a painting whose French title, Le caf\u00e9 de nuit, suits it perfectly. The last thing Vincent has on his mind in this depiction of a sleazy red drinking den is the wonders of God.<\/p>\n
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Van Gogh\u2019s Le cafe de nuit depicts a sleazy red drinking denAlamy<\/p>\n
Painted in 1888, the picture shows a dingy bar with a billiard table in the middle and a ring of comatose customers. The night caf\u00e9 was a favourite haunt of drunks, prowlers, prostitutes. Vincent, too, was a nightly visitor. And what he has tried to do here is suggest the squalor and anxiety of the place with a toxic colour combination of lurid red walls, a green roof and gas lighting so oppressively yellow and bright, it feels like the search beams of a watchtower.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Van Gogh wrote to his brother, \u201cI have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.\u201d\u00a0This is red as the colour of despair, anxiety, disquiet. Now that you mention it, back at the Ordovas show Fischl may have been trying for darker moods than I initially realised in his stormy beach scene. The clouds above the sea are black and threatening. The women haven\u2019t just arrived. They\u2019re putting on their red dresses to leave.<\/p>\n
Thinking again about the Mir\u00f3, what\u2019s interesting is how little red paint it takes to have an impact. His nipple tip is tiny. But you can\u2019t miss it. Prompted again to let my imagination roam, I found myself thinking first of one of the most beloved of all impressionist paintings, Monet\u2019s charming depiction of The Poppy Field Near Argenteuil.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Monet\u2019s The Poppy Field Near Argenteuil uses red to create a sea of delirious colourGetty Images<\/p>\n
You know the one. Blue sky. Green hillside. Woman with a parasol walking through the grass with her child, surrounded by gorgeous freckles of red poppies. Each poppy is tiny. Just a speck of crimson. But every tiny flower is punching above its weight, creating an impression of a sea of delirious colour.<\/p>\n
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Helvoetsluys by JMW TurnerAlamy<\/p>\n