The secretive Bond Street Art Collective has released a new image, In Hyde Park #1, a work of saturated crimsons and pinks; a chromatic piece in which the distinction between interior and exterior, centre and periphery, organic form and abstraction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The enormous pink expanse appears almost geological. Fine veins radiate across the surface like a map of territories that have not yet been named, while the dark central recess introduces a note of depth, suggesting that the image may not depict a surface at all, but an entrance. The eye is drawn towards this recess and then, almost imperceptibly, diverted, in a work which seems at once biological, architectural and vaguely ceremonial.
There is something particularly Bond Street Art about this tension. The BSAC has long been associated with the proposition that an artwork need not disclose its intentions merely because the viewer has arrived with questions. In Hyde Park #1 continues this tradition. It offers no clear narrative, while nevertheless producing the peculiar sensation that a narrative is just about to occur somewhere outside the frame.
The title is equally resistant to resolution. In Hyde Park implies location, familiarity and the reassuring geography of a Royal park. Yet the image itself provides almost no conventional sense of place. There are no paths, benches, trees or wandering dogs. Instead, Hyde Park has been distilled into this image; we are not so much looking at a flower in Hyde Park, but at Hyde Park itself.
The Bond Street Art Collective has released no formal statement regarding the work.