From the Summer 2023 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

“I thought I was never going to do this.” David Remfry is seated in the high-ceilinged front room of his flat in Kensington, wearing the black fedora and matching suit that have become his signature attire. His voice is gentle, edged by humour. “We were in the car the other day and I said to Caroline [Hansberry, his partner], I’m bloody eighty – it’s never going to happen. Three days later, the phone rang. It was the President of the Royal Academy.”

He is talking about his appointment as co-ordinator of this year’s Summer Exhibition, the open submission show that has taken place annually since 1769 – the year after the RA was founded with Joshua Reynolds as its President. Remfry’s theme for the exhibition, which consists variously of works by Royal Academicians, invited artists and the public, is ‘Only Connect’. The famous phrase comes from E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, at the moment when the protagonist Margaret Schlegel resolves to replenish the soul of the conservative, complacent Henry Wilcox (a man “afraid of emotion”), whom she has settled to marry. “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

There is something of a visionary gleam about Remfry himself, who seems spry and alert in his 81st year. “People have become more and more antagonistic,” he says. “I’m troubled by how disparate everybody has become. We have unprecedented ability to communicate, and we’re further away from one another than ever.” Twitter, I suggest, is a perfect example of what he’s describing – a platform that’s supposed to connect people, but often ends up being used for posturing and righteous indignation. “It’s enabled a growing anger,” he agrees. “I wanted the reverse of that with my theme. Empathy is something we’ve lost, to a large degree.”

Remfry’s paintings have an attention to detail – small incidents of gesture and dress – that makes his love of Forster unsurprising. His scenes of people in nightclubs – dancing, drifting, gazing out or retreating into themselves – are luminous and nimbly observant, merging the prosaic and the passionate. The series has occupied Remfry intermittently for decades, ever since he drew surreptitiously in the Locarno Ballroom in Hull as a teenager. Covering his studio walls are paintings in oil and watercolour that exude a hard, bright realism, teetering on the surreal while carrying echoes of Romantic watercolourists such as Blake and Palmer. His new work Indoor Cosmology (2023), a group of 16 oil paintings, will hang in one of four galleries at the RA that he is personally curating. Each picture shows chandeliers hanging from a ceiling, viewed from below. The blazing pendants hover amid shifting tones, the ceilings and walls modulating between yellow and lilac and dilute crimson.

Unusually, these latest images are empty of people, yet a suggestion of human activity persists. The chandeliers connote a sense of occasion, a mood of murmuring anticipation akin to the atmosphere before an opera or a play. It is just such a mood that Remfry hopes to create in a light installation that will wash the grand staircase at Burlington House in colour, recreating the velveteen, cocooned atmosphere of a nightclub. “You’ll feel expectancy,” he says, although he hesitates – probably out of modesty – to define the installation as a work of art.

A taste for the sensual and the tactile characterises many of the artists Remfry has invited to show at the Summer Exhibition. An installation of suspended fabric by Irish fashion designer Richard Malone will transform the rotunda of the Wohl Central Hall. Lindsey Mendick is another recent discovery: he encountered the sculptor’s work last summer in Margate, in a show that included tables with vaginas and a dummy of a Catholic penitent. “She’s a tremendously inventive and provocative artist – bonkers in the best possible way. For the RA, she has done these pots with penises draped around them.” Then there are the lyrical figurative paintings of Paul Dash, a Barbados-born painter – close to Remfry’s age – whose work featured in Tate Britain’s 2022 show of Caribbean-British art, Life Between Islands: “I didn’t know his work, and it’s mind-blowing – very quiet, almost abstract.” The Summer Show hang is a team effort and Remfry is joined by RAs Bill Jacklin, a fellow former Englishman in New York, who selects paintings; Eileen Cooper and Katherine Jones, who focus on prints; Tim Shaw, responsible for most of the sculpture; Clare Woods, who curates a room with an emphasis on still-life; and Peter Barber, who oversees the Architecture Room.

In his chandelier paintings, which have occupied him for three years, Remfry has been veering towards a more abstract register. The pictures were first inspired by a room at Soho House, New York, and yet “they became something other, out of any particular place. In a way, they’re at the other end of the scale from the lift shafts.” He indicates a grid of some 30 square-format watercolours, spread across most of one wall. Each shows the view up (or down) an elevator shaft. As with the chandelier paintings, there’s a slide towards formalism – in this case, a kind of Constructivist geometry. The images were prompted by views of the elevator shafts at the Hotel Chelsea in New York, where Remfry lived for 20 years until 2016. But like his portrayals of people, they gravitate away from specific reality towards a larger, fictive world – a world in which Remfry himself remains a detached observer, looking in from the periphery.

This quality in his work perhaps derives from his itinerant life. Remfry was born in 1942 in Worthing, Sussex. His father, a trademark and patent agent, moved the family to Calcutta in 1945. They returned to Britain two years later (his working-class mother hated India and the idea of servants), settling first in London and then Yorkshire. His father had decided to go into the motor business and bought a garage in Hull. “It was an idea he had,” Remfry recalls with a hint of irony. He lived in Hull from the age of six until he graduated from its art college in 1963 and moved to London.

In the capital he remained apart from the bright young things passing through the leading art schools: “I was finding my own way, and had no idea how to go about it.” His ambition is clear, though, from his decision to take a group of his paintings to the Slade to show to William Coldstream, then Professor of Fine Art. Coldstream gave Remfry the invaluable tip of taking a job as a night-time telephone operator, which left the days clear for painting. Remfry also worked as a deliverer of typewriters and as a cleaner at the Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road. In these years, he skirted the edges of the art world. He used to observe Francis Bacon walking through Kensington or at the Chelsea Arts Club. “He always looked at me as if I might have been someone he’d screwed and forgotten about.” But Bacon’s work had a profound impact. “I thought – and still do think – that his stuff is some of the best ever. He gets me in a way that others don’t.”

From 1969 to 1981, Remfry lived in the comparatively sedate neighbourhood of Lordship Lane, east Dulwich, not far from where – in Howards End – the déclassé Leonard Bast had his lodgings. The critic John Berger, who lived in a more salubrious part of Dulwich, commissioned Remfry to draw his sister-in-law, Maureen. Dating from 1977, the full-length study in graphite epitomises the cool precision of his early portraits, resembling the meticulous pencil drawings of Hockney in the same decade. Maureen Berger meets the viewer’s gaze, her eyes accented by mascara, her shoulders crowned by black plumage and her dress descending in a column of fainter shading. Remfry’s attention to clothing and pattern have remained a hallmark of his art: hats, dresses, shoes, tattoos and other everyday adornments gleam out of his paintings.

American artists had long been an influence – in particular Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. “I loved the Abstract Expressionists, although I was never going to be that kind of painter.” He first visited New York in the late 1970s, taking with him a portfolio. Philip Bruno at the George Staempfli gallery bought a group of drawings and showed them to a dealer in Los Angeles, Joan Ankrum, who offered Remfry a show. “I had enough presence of mind to think that Americans have zero patience. So I said: ‘Great! When?’” In 1979, as he prepared for the exhibition in LA, Remfry was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that left him bedbound for long periods. The debilitating condition was the catalyst for a change that would shape – even galvanise – his entire career. He turned to the more manageable medium of watercolour, producing a large set of paintings – “pretty pictures,” he says with a smile. “I’m a bit ashamed of them now.” And yet, in the years that followed, he became a master of the medium, creating portraits and figure groups (many of them daringly large) that pulse with colour. He used the medium exclusively until around 2012, when oils began to creep back in.

The LA show was a success. Ankrum was a former silent movie actress in the mould of Norma Desmond. Her space on La Cienega Boulevard – next-door to the pink-painted La Cage aux Folles nightclub, famed for its drag performances – had enjoyed a reputation for innovation since opening in 1960. When Remfry’s works arrived, she placed them on the floor of her office, ready for the framer. “We were choosing the moulding, because no-one can look at anything unless it’s got gold around it in LA, and people started to come in. The show was sold out by the time the works were on the walls.”

It wasn’t until 1994, when a friend offered him the use of an apartment in New York for a month, that he began to spend longer periods in the States. From 1995, he and Caroline lived at the Hotel Chelsea, the 12-storey redbrick pile on 23rd Street that was the legendary – notorious – haunt of artists, writers and musicians throughout the 20th century. Dylan Thomas collapsed into a fatal alcoholic coma in one of the apartments in 1953; Arthur Miller wrote his play After the Fall (1964) there, and called the hotel “the high spot of the surreal.” One of the three apartments that Remfry occupied over the years had a roof garden from which he made numerous watercolour cityscapes. “We could see the Twin Towers from one side and the Empire State from the other.” They had planned never to leave New York: Stanley Bard, the long-time manager of the hotel, had given him and Caroline a lease for life. But in 2011 the hotel was sold and the new owners began to pressurise tenants to leave. Remfry was among the last to hold out, even after his apartment was flooded.

“It was a hugely exciting place,” he recalls. “Chelsea was the source of my material.” Quentin Crisp, whom he had met earlier in London, became a regular model in the 1990s. “His terms were transportation and lunch – we always went to the Empire Diner on Eleventh Avenue.” Remfry found subjects, too, in Lucky Cheng’s, a Chinese restaurant run by drag queens and transgender women. Some of the people he met there came to sit for him. Others he simply observed. “There was a kind of vulnerability and aggression,” he says. “All sorts of things combined. People wanting to establish identity. All of that I found amazingly moving.”

In his 1963 novel City of Night, the American writer John Rechy – describing the febrile nocturnal world of New Orleans – refers to a bar as offering “moments of needed respite from the compulsive fury of those days.” Remfry’s nightclub pictures evoke such moments. They visualise random comings together – connections that defy the fury of everyday life. And yet, even as they dance and embrace, his figures are still alone, sealed in their own worlds. The idea finds embodiment in a watercolour from 1995, Le Chat Noir, in which two young women in a nightclub turn away from one another. The woman in the foreground looks down to adjust the end of her long black glove. Her inner life is hinted at, but inevitably remains concealed. We see only a facet of the character. “I’m not a narrative painter,” he reflects, “but I’m not against the idea of telling stories in a painting. All those people have their own backstories.”

Early on in Howards End, there’s a scene in which several characters attend a Beethoven recital. The shared experience is also an episode of cognitive dissonance, with each character reacting differently – thinking differently – in reaction to the music. “She desired to be alone,” writes Forster of Helen Schlegel, Margaret’s sister. “The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning.” The girl in Remfry’s picture might be experiencing the same desire. She is immersed in the life around her and yet separate from it, in a way that the artist himself has perhaps always been. Connection – with oneself, with the world – perhaps requires an act of standing apart.

James Cahill is an art critic and author. His novel Tiepolo Blue (Sceptre), set in the art world, was published last year.

Summer Exhibition 2023 is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 13 June – 20 August 2023.