You have to find universal triggers, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.
DAMIEN HIRST
(Damien Hirst quoted in D. Hirst and G. Burn, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 132)
The alpha male of contemporary British Art and one of the leading artists of his generation, the wide-ranging practice of Damien Hirst continues to challenge the boundaries between art, culture and science. Through his paintings, sculptures and installations, Hirst considers fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. Confronting the viewer with the harsh reality of mortality, he “manages to be frank about death without sliding into morbidity. Going
even further than the most uncompromising painter of a vanitas still life, he presents the viewer with the incontrovertible reality of extinction” (R. Cork, “Injury Time,” The British Art Show 4 , 1995. p. 13). Nowhere is this practice more masterfully exemplified than in his Butterfly Painting series.
The present work is composed of two equal sized square canvases, each of which is covered with a layer of monotone household gloss paint in which actual butterflies are suspended. The canvas on the left is white, on the right blue, an oppositional relationship evocative of that which Hirst sees between black and white. As the artist himself explains, “I’ve always been interested in the split between mind and body, the one and the other, the difference between art and life, life and death, like black and white ... I think of life and death as black and white. If life is white, black is death. Trying to explain or imagine death is like trying to imagine black by only using white. There’s no way you can get to it, it’s like the same thing but opposite. This is life and death isn’t” (A. Dannatt, “Damien Hirst: Life’s like this, then it stops,” Flash Art, no.169, March-April 1993, p.63).
The opposition between light and dark, the vibrant life of the butterflies and the apparent reality of their death in this work yields a sense of tension. Combined with the title itself, Night Follows Day reiterates Hirst’s interest in the biological and aesthetic cycles of creation and destruction. In the artist’s own words, “I think I’ve got an obsession with death, but I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid. You can’t have one without the other” (D. Hirst and G. Burn, On the Way to Work, London, 2001, p. 21).