Page 26 - Studio International - August 1966

Right classicism of his Temple of Apollo and the assumed pop-art
Ay-O's Tactile environment
and, in the background, vulgarity of the strip-cartoon frames, making both look
Rainbow environment-a equally a pose. But it is a pose held with panache, beside
Venetian newspaper called which the attempt to make a potted retrospective out of
the Japanese artist's work
'obscene' and 'decadent' six Frankenthalers succeeds only in disrupting and
weakening the achievement of a genuinely consistent and
lyrical development.
In the general absence of a strong international 'trend'
at the moment or of a theme suggested by the Biennale
authorities, some eight or nine other individual represen-
tations at most achieve much distinction. Foremost
among them is undoubtedly that of J. R. Soto, whose
specially created, long, curving curtain-wall of hanging
blue rods against black, deepening at the centre, is the
most transparently lucid and yet mysterious treatment
of space in the Biennale. Le Parc, standing in, as it were,
as team representative for the Groupe de Recherche d'Art
Visuel, provides an amusing games-parlour of optical and
kinetic devices interspersed with one or two genuine
formal inventions based on reflections and moving light:
the whole exhibit, though, appears astonishingly in-
hibited over the possibilities of colour. The sculptor
Jacobsen, to whom Denmark devotes its whole pavilion,
emerges as a stalwart explorer of a tradition in welded
metal which stretches from Gonzales to Caro; inventive
and occasionally elegantly severe, but usually apt to run
to just too much fuss in detail. The Swiss Pavilion pays

Robert Jacobsen's Spatial vibration,
Above
1964-the 54 year old Dane shared
Etienne Martin with one of his
the major sculpture award with
sculptures in the French Pavilion
Etienne Martin