Page 62 - Studio International - June 1966

Ayrton some of his most complex sculpture to date. We it, that we find, most sharply delineated and accentuated,
are all, as Camus once said, special cases and, probably, the stress, the tension, the tortured striving that are the
we are all makers of our own mazes from which we try, hallmarks of Ayrton's heavily-muscled, suffering, en-
more or less successfully, to escape. The maze maker, in nobled figures. The maze itself has become a kind of
fact, together with his creation, constitute an aweful cliche image of our society, ranging from a jolly Bank
paradigm of the individual, of mankind, of politics; he Holiday at Hampton Court, via the network of one-
is the logical end of Ayrton's search for the various arche- way streets in any great city, to the world of realpolitik in
typal figures whom, over the last decade, he has por- South East Asia, so that Ayrton's maze maker restores to
trayed in bronze or on canvas. us something of the original, literal meaning, while at
It is in the creation of the maze, and in the escape from the same time emphasizing the pressing, human univer-
sality of both the situation and the image. This is most
clearly indicated in two works, Emerging Figure and Mirror
Maze.
In the Triptych Emerging Figure, we see three different
versions of the man, of a man, in three stages of movement,
each stage bringing him further forward into our vision,
each stage bringing him further out of the maze, each
stage making him paradoxically more deeply entangled,
more lost. This is a harsh, brutal, and at the same time
deeply compassionate piece of sculpture.
In his Mirror Maze, Ayrton has used a variety of differ-
ent materials to achieve his effects; bronze, copper,
perspex, and taughtly-strung elastic thread. Inside this
complex construction a man half kneels, half crouches,
his hands entangled in the wires of the maze, wires which
fan out through a screen as if from an altar, making of the
man an almost hieratic figure, for all his being trapped.
Not only is he trapped in the maze corporeally but his
image is also trapped by the gleaming, polished metal
surfaces—the mirrors—which reflect and cause to ricochet
and reverberate the multiple images of this single but
universal lost man.
The theoretical, the intellectual, and the moral points—
are all made in one's visual apprehension of the work. But
Pupate 1965 there is, there must be, more to sculpture than that.
White chalk on black paper Sculpture is, of its very nature, a physical thing, demand-
19 x 24 in.
ing consideration in terms of space and form, and the
Demeter pregnant 1966 problem with Mirror Maze is that it is boxed in. One can-
Bronze not, in the usual sense, walk round it, and it ought, there-
21 x 13 x 14 1/2 in.
fore, to be, theoretically, inaccessible. Yet such is
Ayrton's Daedalic skill that the spatial effects are
achieved, by the mirrored surfaces, with a multiplicity of
images which one could not achieve by more conven-
tional means; once again Ayrton has demonstrated his
rare combination of emotional force and consummate
artistic intelligence.
I have devoted, perhaps, a disproportionate amount of
space to one work, but that one piece is crucial to
Ayrton's theme and to his execution of it; it seems to be
the central work around which the others are grouped,
and to which they are related. This is not to dismiss the
others, least of all the paintings and drawings, in which
there emerges again and again Ayrton's pre-occupation
with the Greek and Cretan landscape which he paints
so well and which form the complementary background
to his paintings of those figures which have become, as
his involvement with Daedalus has increased, more peri-
pheral in the last year or two. Ayrton is painting as well
as he has done in the past ten years and, as always, his
drawing is impeccable; clear, controlled, and vigorous.
But it is the Maze Maker in all his energy and in all his
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travail to whom, in admiration, one returns.