The movement between what good taste deems desirable and that which should be hidden from sight is distilled though the lens of art history in Keith Coventry’s paintings. Putting formalist devices to work in the representation of contemporary society’s dirty secrets, Coventry creates erudite juxtapositions between lofty visions and debased realities. It is this penchant for poking fun at the rarefied seriousness of cultural hierarchies and peculiarly British traditions that made his inclusion in the seminal Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997 so appropriate. Coventry’s ability to create paintings that address the history of picture making in the twentieth century with satirical wit is the definitive feature of his practice. His fluency in so many painterly languages, from the aesthetics of formal constructivism and Mondrian’s abstractions to his borrowing of fauvist flair or Sickert-esque description, allows him to use his means as an end, to turn stylization into subject matter.

Part of a series of works executed in 2004, Mediterranean is a wonderfully concise example of Coventry’s modernist inversions. Here Coventry re-interpreted the fauvist-inspired painter Raoul Dufy’s depictions of the Cote d’Azur. Painted during the rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of WWII, Dufy’s paintings are famously void of any suggestion that the spell of serene tranquility that enchants his pictures of Hyeres, Nice and the Bay of Angels could be broken by grim political realities. Dufy’s works are all light and air, a visual confection that Coventry inverts with his black impastoed application of paint in which the direction of brush-marks provide the only means of delineating the shapes of palm trees, coast lines and cars that bejewel the coastal scene. Coventry’s preference for glazing his works and incorporating a glass screen into their frames furthers the foreclosure of visual access to the scene.
This series was the subject of the Keith Coventry: New Works exhibition at ROVE Gallery, London in 2004.