Collection: 'Incognito' - Richard Templeton Smith

Incognito

Richard Templeton Smith

19.03.25 - 26.04.25

Richard Templeton Smith’s new solo exhibition Incognito, his sixth with the gallery since 2014, features a suite of eleven oil paintings completed in a mountain village near the Spanish coastal city of Gandia. Smith’s oneiric paintings depict resolute human figures in lavishly detailed outdoor landscapes and interior settings. Operating as fragmented and surreal dreamscapes, these new compositions showcase Smith’s exceptional virtuosity as a draughtsman and instinctual prowess as a painter.

The works in Incognito continue a long-standing preoccupation for Smith. Ever since his brilliant caricatures gained attention in late 1960s Johannesburg working for the Sunday Times, Smith has consistently explored the human form. Despite a successful detour into landscape painting, he is best known for his accomplished figurative works of the past two decades. Rendered in his signature vibrant palette, the paintings in Incognito revisit familiar formal devices from earlier series – stage-like settings, autonomous painterly marks, and pictures within pictures – while arriving at fresh and striking pictorial outcomes.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but raised and educated in South Africa, Smith and his wife, Li, relocated from the Southern Cape village of Onrus to Ireland in 2019. Frustrated by the inclement weather, they moved two years later to Spain’s Valencia region. While his new body of work is undeniably shaped by his surroundings, it transcends mere illustration of his current environment. True to his long-standing approach, Smith’s dreamlike compositions emerge intuitively from his imagination, evolving gradually in the studio.

Richard Smith remarks: “I start off painting abstract, but the paint always tells me there’s a figure there. These paintings have nothing to do with me. They are not autobiographical. I don’t know where they come from. At first, they are strangers to me, but over time in my studio, as I develop each composition, layering the paint, perhaps adding charcoal lines to a figure, they become familiar and intimate.”

The exhibition’s title derives from one of its featured works, Incognito (With Artifacts), which depicts a masked figure in a bowler hat and greatcoat. This mysterious figure is posed off-centre against a dry Spanish landscape, cypress trees visible through an arched hacienda wall. Throughout the series, motifs and symbols subtly reference Spain. In The Beekeeper, for instance, the swirling pink floor beneath a generic yellow figure echoes decorative patterns found on a tree-lined passage (Paseo) in Gandia.

Rendered with the distilled intensity and economy of R.B. Kitaj, Smith’s painting Mediterráneo reads as an homage to Spain’s restorative climate. Yet, beyond these environmental cues, it is the presence of human figures – men and women, black and white, some seated and specifically detailed, others standing and anonymous – that ultimately defines the work’s achievement. Like Kitaj, Smith is a humanist painter, balancing abstraction with a deep engagement in representing complex human presences.

- Sean O’ Toole