Haunch of Venison, London
Acquired directly from t꧋he above by t🍸he present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals very light and unobtrusive handling marks to the bottom right corner, to the centre right edge, and a few very light ones to the right edge. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Poetically variegated across an expanse of individual chromatic circles, the cellular kaleidoscopic field of Mercuric Thiocyanate essays a monumental and immaculate exhibition of Damien Hirst's iconic corpus of Spot paintings. Suspended in twelve rows and twenty columns, each of the individual two-hundred and forty colour roundels are carefully distinct in hue, and yet together the household gloss-paint discs span the entire chromatic spectrum. Belonging to the defining body of work that first brought Hirst notary acclaim, this painting represents the culmination of a practice heralded by the legendary self-curated exhibition Freeze in 1988 and brought to a terminus with Hirst's first major UK retrospective at Tate Britain to open in April this year. Executed over twenty years after the incipient Pharmaceutical Paintings, Mercuric Thiocynate broadcasts an entirely unique and exquisite lyrical beauty underscored by the palliative comfort provided by scientific medical advancements.

Identified by Hirst as the defining belief-system of our contemporary age, science occupies a position of authority to rival that of religion. By infusing art with the clinical sterility and significatory reassurance of pharmaceutical products, Hirst substitutes the role of religion as reassurance against death and the afterlife with the empirically confident aesthetic and clinical placation of pharmacology. First conceived alongside the Medicine Cabinets in the early 1990s, Hirst's spot paintings are imbued with the same measured rational order and pleasing formal cogency of his recreated ubiquitous Pharmacy store vitrines.  As expounded by the artist: "I started them as an endless series ... a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies' scientific approach to life. Art doesn't purport to have all the answers; the drug companies do. Hence the title of the series, The Pharmaceutical Paintings, and the individual titles of the paintings themselves... Art is like medicine, it can heal." (Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). By taking on such an iconography Hirst restores to art the miraculous function it once provided; sterile, medicinal and forensic, Hirst's Spot paintings are a modern day devotional paean to the life-giving promise of modern science. Herein, the spot paintings posit the spectator as unwitting participant in Humanity's global paranoia of death.

Drugs have become the ubiquitous modifier of Nature: the remit of human existence is continually conditioned by the powers of modern science, from pre-birth sedatives dealt through the placenta, to near-death stimulants fed through an intravenous drip. When these works were first produced, the critic Jerry Saltz commented: "The names of these drugs conjure a vision of human misery and dread. With every drug comes a reference to a particular sickness, along with a list of side effects...These drugs form an analogue for the mysteries of the human body and its vast hermetic complexity" (Jerry Saltz, Art in America, June 1995, cited in Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, Op. Cit., p. 173). Disseminated via a simple schema of geometric logic, the controlled emotionless self-restriction of Hirst's candy coloured grid belies an unsettling and fractured viewing experience: "If you look closely at any one of these paintings a strange thing happens; because of the lack of repeated colours there is no harmony... in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease; yet the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything. The horror that can overwhelm everything at any moment." (the artist in: Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, Op. Cit., p. 246).

The all-pervading presence of death is the Hirstian trope par excellence. Cryptically hidden beneath the immaculate surface of Mercuric Thiocyanate lies a deathly undertone distinct from the majority of Hirst's pharmaceutical paintings. Where Hirst usually adopts names of drugs possessing palliative and healing properties, the chemical compound of Hg(SCN)_2, more commonly known as 'Mercury Thiocyanate', is an acutely toxic pharmacological substance used for chemical or organic synthesis. However, this particular chemical is famous for its extraordinary exothermic reaction: though stable at room temperature, when lit, the chalky white compound burns readily in air, rapidly swelling to many times its original volume generating a coil of cohesive ash resembling a serpent. In pyrotechnics the chemical was used as a Firework called Pharoh's Serpent, though the substance was later banned after a number of children died from consuming of the resultant solid. Violently toxic, upon ingestion the patient may die within a matter of hours from peripheral vascular collapse. Thus the deathly allure of Mercuric Thiocyanate mirrors the quintessential trait of Hirst's eponymous painting: behind compelling aesthetic appeal and comforting geometric order lies hidden the inevitability of mortality.

Hirst's complex dialectic, founded in themes of death and challenging faith structures, is ultimately revealed through the cheerful simplicity of colour:  "I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. I hate taste - it's acquired" (Damien Hirst, Ibid, p. 246). His aim is to motivate an audience to think about the terms of their existence, to ontologically expose and undermine the avoidance of death by fully and poetically acknowledging its omnipotent pervasion: Hirst's pre-eminent canon is the Danse Macabre for the 21st Century.