Arg-Ala is a jewel-like example of Hirst’s most renowned series of work: the Pharmaceutical paintings. The present work constitutes one of the earliest of Hirst’s Spot paintings – the overarching series to which the Pharmaceutical paintings belong – thereby not only belonging to a seminal series within the artist’s oeuvre, but also embodying a historical representation of such. The contrast in this work between the organisational composition of the uniquely coloured one inch spots with the brilliant white surface provides the viewer with a stimulating visual experience, one that is truly representative of the project that embodies Hirst’s highly influential artistic practice.

As one of the thirteen sub-series within the Spot painting category, the Pharmaceutical paintings remains the first and most prolific. Each Spot painting shares a certain set of properties: the spots are arranged on a grid made invisible by a white or off-white background; no two spots on a given work touch each other; and no hue is ever repeated on the same work. First conceived alongside the Medicine Cabinets, this body of work is imbued with the same measured rational order and pleasing formal cogency as his pharmacy store vitrines. “I started them as an endless series,” explains Hirst, “a scientific approach to painting in a similar way to the drug companies’ scientific approach to life” (Damien Hirst, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, London 1997, p. 246). Furthering this conversation between his paintings and the medical practice, Hirst concocted the titles of these works from an alphabetical listing of drug names cited in the Sigma-Aldrich chemical company catalogue that he first encountered in the early 1990s. Hence, the Pharmaceutical paintings as well as the spots themselves can be read as signifiers for individual pills.

The Spot paintings were originally conceived as an endless series of paintings in which the choice of size, variation of colour and number of spots on each painting were systematically infinite. Like a true scientist, Hirst expertly mixed hundreds of tones and shades of each colour in the spectrum in a controlled experiment. Organised only by the structure of the circular coloured discs evenly spaced on the white background in a grid-like formation, Hirst worked through his experimentations with colour and scale in a highly logical manner. His canvases range from Iodomethane- 13c (1999-2000), a 40-foot canvas containing 1 inch spots, to L-Isoleucinol (2008-2011), which measures 10 by 16 inches and contains 25,781 one millimeter spots. No one colour seems to be privileged over another, and thus no hierarchy is implied. This even-handedness, where colour relationships are coolly, carefully balanced, puts forward a draughtsman-like rigor to the canvas. Hirst has stated that “Mathematically, with the spot paintings, I probably discovered the most fundamentally important thing in any kind of art. Which is the harmony of where color can exist on its own, interacting with other colours in a perfect format” (Damien Hirst cited in: Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, London 2001, p. 120).

With its perfectly oriented spots, the present work is a captivating experience for the viewer – even delicious and candy-like – as per Hirst’s intent. However, there is a certain problematisation that comes to light in this painting, namely inherent in the implied celebration of a heavily mediated and medicated postmodern experience. Ever in touch with allusions and theoretical discourse, Hirst rescues the age-old artistic genre of the grid from Modernist hands and returns it back to its original roots in scientific thought and genetic structure. In this way, the work’s apparent simplicity of form is counterbalanced by its complexity of content, so that this painting, while relying to a certain degree purely on its visual appeal, also possesses an arresting intellectual punch characteristic of Hirst’s process.