Denzil Forrester: Itchin & Scratchin, Nottingham Contemporary, review Rapture, spiritual renewal, ecstasy

By Alastair Sooke

What does it feel like to toil away in obscurity for the best part of 40 years before success is thrust upon you? “It feels great,” grins the 64-year-old painter Denzil Forrester, as we walk through “Itchin & Scratchin”, a new exhibition of his pictures of nightclubs at Nottingham Contemporary. Here is a good-news story for everyone to savour. 

Born in Grenada in 1956, Forrester came to London aged 11 to live with his seamstress mother in Stoke Newington. A talented painter, he ended up at art school, where his work shone a light upon the reggae nightclubs in Hackney that he used to visit every Friday night. 

Forrester would position himself behind the bar, with a stick of charcoal and a roll of A1 paper, and fire off quick, instinctive drawings – each lasting no more than the length of one of the dub records blasting from the speakers – of revellers on the dancefloor. The following afternoon, he’d select the best sketches (I wish Nottingham Contemporary were showing some), and take them to his studio to make paintings. 

Forrester was working from within – depicting gestures, sensations, rhythm, movement, rather than the way things looked. He was also documenting an underground scene that, hitherto, had been ignored by British art. 

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What about the paintings, though: are they any good? The short answer is: yes, they’re mostly mesmerising. Often, Forrester zooms in on small groups of dancers, using faceted forms and prismatic colours, derived from early Modernism, to evoke, as they vibrate and pulse, the chest-pounding experience of listening to throbbing dub music. Their energy is contagious, but his brooding bird’s-eye views of packed dancefloors – including, here, a very early example from 1978 – are grander. With their melancholic, purplish palette, they’re also more mysterious and profound.