Iopanoic acid is a medical contrast medium, used to enhance the visibility of the gallbladder. But it is also the title of a 2011 work by Damien Hirst, depicting the starting and intermediate positions of the snooker balls in Ronnie O’Sullivan’s dazzling maximum break at the Crucible 17 years ago, compiled in five minutes, 20 seconds to announce the Picasso of the baize to the world.
Quite what connects 15 reds and 15 blacks to an advanced form of cholecystographic imaging must remain a Hirstian mystery, to be decoded over mid-session intervals during the world championships that begin in Sheffield on Saturday, but the painting illuminates a fascinating connection between the artist and his unlikely waistcoated muse.
“Damien loves me, I love him, and everybody else will fit in around what we do,” O’Sullivan says. It is only for Hirst, the recalcitrant Ronnie claims, that he returned to the game this time last year, declaring: “Damien will be the only person in my corner.”
Hirst is evidently a serendipitous wingman: of the four championships he has attended, O’Sullivan has won three. A potent but imperceptible force appears to flow from the man most famous for pickling a cow in formaldehyde, emboldening his fellow genius to regard the green cloth as a canvas to be decorated with ever more outrageous flourishes.
Look into the gloom at the Crucible Theatre and the likelihood is that Hirst will again be there among the rapt crowd, distinguishable throughout the next fortnight by his oversized, dark-rimmed glasses. The story goes that he was first drawn to O’Sullivan out of an intellectual fascination with the Rocket’s strange, impulsive ways, but the more prosaic reality is that neither of them can kick the snooker drug. When Hirst made £111 million at auction in 2008, he and his new best friend were to be found not at Sotheby’s but hitting a few balls inside a dimly lit hall in King’s Cross.
The relationship has not just endured, but strengthened. Both O’Sullivan’s children, Lily and Ronnie Jnr, have received Hirst artworks as presents, while he and his fiancee Laila now have a giant yellow and aqua abstract with which to adorn the living room at their Essex mansion. It is the least the mysterious Damien can do, having been so inspired by the Picassoesque aesthetic of Ronnie’s brilliance with a cue. “Or perhaps it is more like Francis Bacon,” Hirst said, in a rare public appreciation. “What he does is instinctive. Anything done to the level Ronnie has taken it is art.”
By their shared appetite for provocation, one can see why Hirst and O’Sullivan might relish one another’s company. Where snooker’s incorrigible bad boy sparked outrage by lewdly stroking a microphone at a Chinese female reporter, Hirst caused his own diplomatic incident – apart from when he unveiled a diamond-encrusted skull, that is, or killed 9,000 butterflies to create a “beautiful explosion of vanity” – by describing the 9/11 attacks as “something that nobody would ever have thought possible” on an artistic level. He later apologised unreservedly for the remark.
But there appears a deeper wellspring in Hirst’s admiration of what he sees on the table. Few could that many of his complex configurations of coloured dots, his trademark “spot paintings”, together represent a kind of visual homage to the intricacy of an O’Sullivan break. The rendering of Iopanoic Acid illustrates as much, with the spots exactly replicating the size of the snooker balls. Hirst is nothing if not honest in his sincerity. “Damien is one of the most generous, kind-hearted people I’ve met,” says O’Sullivan, not predisposed to suffer fools. “He is one of the few people I want around when I’m playing. He has invested so much time and energy in helping me through the difficult times, and I don’t want to let him down. I miss seeing him. I miss seeing my friends.”
Other artists have drawn creative impetus from sport. In 1992, Sir Peter Blake produced a portrait of Britain’s most celebrated professional wrestler, Kendo Nagasaki – otherwise known as Peter Thornley from Stoke-on-Trent – having often watched bouts with his mother, dreaming of wrestling himself. “I would have been The Beatnik,” he said. “I would have worn a leather jacket and been a Jack Kerouac-type character.”
Hirst resists such aspirations, restricting himself to potting sessions at home in Devon or at the Groucho Club. But snooker becomes, through a Hirstian lens, an elevated form, and when O’Sullivan walks through those Crucible curtains tomorrow in his silks there will once more be beauty on the baize.
