Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
The Catalan Mousetrap (1975)
Oil on board, 60 x 60cm (23¾ x 23¾")
Signed; also signed, inscribed and dated 1975 verso

 

Provenance: With David...

Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
The Catalan Mousetrap (1975)
Oil on board, 60 x 60cm (23¾ x 23¾")
Signed; also signed, inscribed and dated 1975 verso

 

Provenance: With David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 1975.

 

Exhibited: Limerick, Belltable Arts Centre, 'Towards the World's Edge', 1981, Catalogue No.42.

 

Literature: Patrick J. Murphy, 'A Passion for Collecting: A Memoir', illustrated p.190.

 

The bright colours and visual inventiveness of Colin Middletons painting in the 1970s appear primarily to have been sparked by the various journeys he was able to take during this decade, first to Australia, where he stopped to work for a month, as the culmination of a round-the-world sea voyage, and then to Spain, where his daughter, Jane, was living.

 

The Catalan Mousetrap was part of the Barcelona Quartet included in Middletons 1976 exhibition at the David Hendriks Gallery (the Quartet also included Bon Voyage, now in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art). Middletons time in Spain became increasingly influential in this heightened palette and the discovery of a new landscape and local culture, and also in reigniting Middletons early interest in Surrealism, visiting museums devoted to Dali and Miro.

 

As with his earlier surrealist works, abstract elements of pattern and design also began to be integrated into Middletons paintings in the 1970s, although often more overtly than in the wartime period when he was still working as a designer for the linen industry. Within the present painting this creates repeated or connected series of shapes and colours across the canvas, uniting an unexpected and impenetrable association of objects and characters. Beginning in 1972 with the Wilderness Series, Middleton began to develop a particular style and iconography within his work, still related to earlier periods, often playing with our sense of perspective and physical logic to evoke a heightened mood that can be simultaneously joyous, mysterious and unsettling. Middleton noted that the incongruous advertising hoardings placed in the middle of an empty landscape that he saw in Spain had influenced him and, despite the visual unity of The Catalan Mousetrap, there is also a sense of disjuncture between its various elements which is perhaps reflective of this unexpected source.

 

Dickon Hall, 2019

 

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