Page 19 - Studio International - July 1966

Later a.m.
HORNSEY COLLEGE OF ART Eric Gadsby is a colourist. The
interesting problem which his pictures raise is how to
resolve colour into an acceptable form, in which the eye
can absorb the form without difficulty and concentrate
on the colour. It is a problem which underlies the chang-
ing appearance of abstract paintings since way back in
the days of Rothko and Still, and has been crystallized in
the work of younger artists such as Noland, or, in England,
Robyn Denny. Put another way, does a colourist com-
pose ?
`Does Caro compose?' asked Andrew Forge in a recent
interview in these pages. An obvious 'Yes' (though I for-
get if Caro said `Yes'). But in Noland, for example, there
is a sense in which he does not compose: the diamond-
shaped paintings, quartered into stripes—you feel that in
the end by finding a form and keeping to it, varying one
painting from another only by changes of colour, you do
not notice the form and see only the colours. By repetition
the form disappears. It is a solution which other colourists
as well as Noland have discovered and it has served them.
It is the closed-form approach to colour, and the merits
of one practitioner against another are judged not only
by standards of taste (`Does this colour appeal to my
taste?') but also by versatility in the manipulation of a
Eric Gadsby Light-weight 1966 set form. Gadsby's is the free approach to form in colour,
Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in.
by a different route he too arrives at a solution in which
the composition is a mere subordinate to the main event
of his picture, the changes of colour.
Light-weight, reproduced here, has possibly more associa-
tions through the forms than his other paintings in the
show, Tab, Flobe, etc. In all his paintings, though, the
Roger Cook Brazen 1966
Acrylic on canvas 67+ x 66+ in. curves and undulations of the forms have the look of a
kind of fortuitous calculation, symmetrically repeated in
the left and right halves. Like butterfly patterns, with the
difference that here the contours have been magically
preserved intact and not allowed to bleed.
These remarks, I am aware, may seem as marginal to
the paintings as I have said the composition is to the
colour. Non-associative colour, non-descriptive form—the
subject of these paintings is not Nothing, but it is a region
where comment may be superfluous.

May 26
ROWAN GALLERY By virtue of having twice exhibited pre-
viously (his second one-man exhibition at Rowan Gallery
closed June 23) Roger Cook, though young, is really the
Old Master among this year's exhibitors at WHITE-
CHAPEL. The strong point, perhaps the only one, in this
year's New Generation seems to be colour, and Cook is a
colourist. (Incredibly I have so far not seen a single
drawing in any studio, even pinned on the wall.)
Brazen would belie the implications of its title in any
other context than Cook's pictures. Like all his pictures
here it is in two colours only, one less than Albers, one
more than Reinhardt, in this case orange and shiny black.
Its additional feature is the slight padding which has
been inserted between the stretcher and the back of the
canvas. By a simple stroke we are away from the world of
pure colour and flat spaces, into a new one where there
seems to be a distant second-cousin relationship with
Oldenburg's stuffed objects. This object, though, is a noth-