Bencilpenicilina Benzatina

"I painted the first ones directly on the wall. I bought empty tins, mixed paint in them, put them in a grid on the floor, and then just painted from the tins... I'd always done collages when I was a student at Goldsmiths; then I realized I'd always used colour to solve formal problems, so I'd ended up with very colourful things that looked more like curtains than collages and paintings. I'd been weak formally , and in every other way - metephorically, in terms of content - because I'd always solved problems with colour. So I started doing things that had no colour in them - I tried to separate colour out. Then the Spot Paintings just dealt with colour, how they respond differently to paintings in reds and oranges than to paintings in browns and purples. I think I'd been looking at photographs of space, or of the mood, where they put little crosses on the photograph - the grid over the landscape. It's this unknowable landscape, but the crosses give you the false feeling that you have some understanding of it. I was thinking about a system like that in terms of colour, so I tentatively chose this grid. I made the spots and the gaps between them the same size. Also, at first I experimented with putting two spots of the same colour quite far apart in the painting, but they would jump out at you like a chord; so I decided that no two colours would be the same, to stop you from pirck out chords of colour. I wanted it to be like moon landscape: you'd be at sea.
(The artist quoted in interview with A. Temkin, in 'Damien Hirst' in D. Frankel (ed.), Contemporary Voices; Works from the UBS Art Collection, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2005, p. 55).