The exhibition by Thomas Hoareau at Galerie Dusseldorf reveals a talented artist who decides to stay in a provincial city and view his world through a window.  Regardless of whether this view is of a crack in the pavement or a corporate edifice, the influences brought to bear on such a decision are also provincial.  This makes Hoareau as much a victim as success story.  He is a victim along with so many others of a well meaning but inept educational system which reflects the provincial society around it.  This society pays for but devalues good art teaching as well as art and above all devalues the enormous human talent within its boundaries.  It can be argued that Hoareau's exhibition provides a focus for this devaluation.

That Hoareau is a talented painter is not in dispute.  What is questionable is the nature of those influences which affect his vision and hold it either in mediocrity or elevate it to those heights from which all may benefit.  Among the prevailing influences is an amount of journalistic jingoism replete with high sounding superlatives which smack of flattery and patronage.  This is a hallmark of a provincial society where speaking the truth is usually taken as offence while political correctness is equated with courtly grace.

In his suite of paintings labelled 'The Street' Hoareau's gifted eye displays the juxtaposition of detail in an endlessly fascinating way.  Yet he includes a gritty impedimenta such as the out of focus newspapers in the foreground of Horse Shoe Bridge with its flat theatrical backdrop of sky.  As a student he would have benefited from the squared up examples of a Jeffrey Smart or Sir Stanley Spencer.  Sadly in a provincial city these names were ignored in most of the teaching institutions of the time.

Again, in the suite of paintings 'Homages', the homage is not so much to the heroes of the past as to those uncertain influences which brought Hoareau and others a degree of conditioning, well meaning but ultimately self defeating.  In Northbridge Gothic for instance, the degree of narcissism evident is far removed from Grant Wood's American Gothic which celebrates the integrity of early pioneers, the people who first settled the land and built on it.  American Gothic pays homage to the hard working frugality of the Pilgrim Fathers and before them to the Protestant traditions of Europe.  Northbridge Gothic has only itself to celebrate.

No amount of verbal validation can overcome a soaring talent which is bound by the inherited chains of mediocrity that surrounds it and which may ultimately destroy it.