A superb example of one of Damien Hirst’s most iconic series, Mercuric Thiocyanate, 2007 demonstrates the culmination of the artist’s career-long preoccupation with conceptions of mortality, analeptics, and the prescription drug industry. Mercuric Thiocyanate belongs to Hirst’s Pharmaceutical series, which inaugurated thirteen subseries within his larger Spot Paintings chapter, dating from 1986 to 2011. A monumental canvas comprised of two-hundred and forty uniformly-sized kaleidoscopic roundels against an ivory background, the painting establishes a chromatic yet minimalist field, disorienting the viewer with an inconceivable sense of depth. Through this formation of weightless dimension, Mercury Thiocyanate manifests the development of Hirst’s practice from Controlled Substance Key Painting, 1994, to a more abstract yet conceptual approach.
The paintings included in the Pharmaceutical series, such as Mercuric Thiocyanate, acquired titles that Hirst selected from his personal copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference – an annually-published compendium of trade intelligence of prescription drugs – after their creation. Regarding the medicinal nature of the title, Hirst elucidated, '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', such as Mercuric Thiocyanate (Damien Hirst, 'On Dumb Painting', I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London, 1997, p. 246). Often mistaken for candy, due to the dots' vibrant and jovial palette, Hirst's pills visually eschew the toxicity of their namesake, 'Mercury(II) thiocyanate', or Hg(SCN)2, a chemical compound which was banned in Germany after the death of numerous children who had mistakenly consumed it in a solid state. A master of juxtaposing death with life and sickness with health, Hirst imbues Mercuric Thiocyanate with an ironic somberness, eliciting notions of ambivalence and conflict.
Mercury Thiocyanate suggests an illusory sense of repetition; despite the stylistic duplication of the spots, each colour hue is distinct. Though immediately most evocative of Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts, such as 180 Colors, 1971, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hirst has asserted that any similarities between his Spot Paintings, such as Mercury Thiocyanate, and other painterly experimentation with colour distinction and repetition are purely formal, declaring that '[t]hey have nothing to do with Richter or Poons or Bridget Riley or Albers or even Op. They’re about the urge or the need to be a painter above and beyond the object of painting. I’ve often said that they are like sculptures of painting' (Damien Hirst, 'On Dumb Painting', p. 246). Mercury Thiocyanate also references its medium through its composition and technique, as the work engenders an immediate response with its seemingly sleek, minimalist approach, while the laborious, painstaking precision entailed with the creation of the work becomes conspicuous upon closer inspection. In this way, Mercury Thiocyanate is reminiscent of Pop Art in its nearly mechanical reproduction of each circle, while retaining the manual, intimate quality championed by the major abstract art movements of the 20th century.
The individual shades of each spot engage with perceptions of infinity and randomness, suggestive of the role of chance in works by Jean Arp and Jackson Pollock. Moreover, there appears to be an undeniable similitude to Joseph Cornell’s Pharmacies created between 1943-1953, which included spiritual and creative 'medicine', such as maps and sand, instead of the traditional pharmaceuticals which he was forbidden to consume as a Christian Scientist. Contrarily, however, Hirst’s work is simultaneously more clinical and abstract than his predecessors. According to Michael Bracewell, the Spot Paintings such as Mercury Thiocyanate 'comprise "art" at its most intense – a concentrated and chemical version of itself, as clinical in its multiplicity as the drugs after which they are titled… While appearing laden with meaning – linguistic, pictorial, scientific – their power lies, paradoxically, in their very inscrutability' (Michael Bracewell, 'Art Without the Angst', in Jason Beard and Millicent Wilner, Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, London, 2013, n.p.).