Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives

Double exposure: overlaid details of Duccio, ‘Virgin and Child on a Throne’, (1308-11) oil on panel, and Patrick Heron, ‘Big Complex Diagonal with Emerald and Reds’ (1972-74), oil on canvas

Tate St Ives’ Patrick Heron show is up until the last day of September. Whilst the paintings themselves have received the double thumbs-up emoji from all sides, the reactions to Tate’s controversial decision to group the works together by theme, rather than chronology, have been, let’s say, less than 100% enthusiastic: the Guardian’s Rachel Cooke called the show hang ‘utterly exasperating’, whilst Michael Prodger, writing in the New Statesman, demanded that ‘someone should curate the curators’. There’s only one thing for it: Instantloveland will just have to throw a toothbrush and a change of underwear into an overnight bag and head down to Cornwall to judge for itself…

Alongside its review of the show, Instantloveland is delighted to announce that it will also be hosting a group of short meditations on Heron’s paintings by Newlyn-based poet, M J Oliver. Five of her six prose-poems find their origin in a face-to-face encounter with a painting in the exhibition; the sixth pairs a Heron with a Duccio Madonna, seen in Siena.

M J Oliver’s memoir, ‘Jim Neat: The Case of a Young Man down on his Luck’ will be published by Seren Books in September 2019.