Page 52 - Studio International - December1996

Jeffrey Steele Aludel 1966
Oil on canvas 60 x 40 in.
John Golding Phaestos Gill 1965
Acrylic on canvas 74 x 56 in.
Jeffrey Steele
Talviaurinko 1964-5
Oil on canvas
30 x 18 in.
John Golding, who shares the current show at the
Axiom with Charles Perry. These big bold abstract
paintings never quite get off the ground. Mr Golding is
an expert on Cubism, and lectures at the Courtauld—
facts which (not having studied the catalogue) I wasn't
aware of when I first looked at his work. Hindsight
suggests, however, that there is a hidden Cubist influence
in these paintings, and one that hasn't been completely
absorbed.
And yet another theoretician is Jeffrey Steele, at
MCROBERTS & TUNNARD. AS Cyril Barrett points out in
his introduction to the catalogue, Steele actually ties
himself to fixed mathematical progressions. But it would
be easy to miss these without a cicerone. The initial
impact of the paintings is cool but still sensuous—here is
an art which has refined and distilled the more brutal
effects of Op, and which is able to use optical tricks as
part of a richer and more complex language. Father
Barrett sees the more recent works in the show as sum-
mations of natural phenomena, and in this he is surely
right. In this Steele and Perry are curiously alike.
But in fact, the theoretical artist usually finds his hap-
piest inspirations when he is doing precisely this—trying
to harmonize the accidental forces that he sees at work