Page 31 - Studio International - March 1966

Shadows play an important role in Lanceley's formal Lanceley is first preoccupied with pure form. His shapes
system, echoing shapes and suggesting all sorts of are crisp and controlled, and they are consistently
resonances; they provide the passage between three interesting.
dimensions and two . He does not, as yet, fully control the overtones of the
Face to face with Lanceley's images, with their pro­ things in his sculptures. For instance, there is a huge
pellors and struts and wires and cogwheels, their wooden Hispano-Suiza propeller in one of them, pro­
snaking, spiralling lines traced by wood in air, and their visionally titled Heavier than Air, which no effort of
absurd fluttering wings (butterfly? model airplane? Lanceley·s can disinfect of its associations. But this
Sopwith Camel?), one can very easily sentimentalize does not matter much, since this work (unlike most of
them by taking them as wry comments on the machine the others) is full of a queer half-magical whimsy, like
age, on the origins of flight, or what you will. The fact an effigy of a flying machine made by a Trobriand
that Lanceley uses junk forms with such odd, capricious priest, and so one thinks of it in terms of blocked
tenderness would support such an interpretation. function: the machine constructed for an uncertain
Yet I don't think it gives a just account of these very purpose that doesn't work but is beautiful.
original and startling contraptions. Lanceley is not a Most of the time. however. Lanceley exploits a finer
raconteur. Once the wheel is in the painting it ceases ambiguity than this: the form that is so pared down and
to be a wheel. It has been stared out of existence and concise that, like a Miro hand or an Ernst dove, it could
become a form, a thing stripped of all its attributes. At assume any one of a number of meanings. Lanceley is
times (and especially in the drawings, several of which a good colourist and, like many young English painters.
are brilliant) Lanceley makes us aware of a hallucinatory an ingenious craftsman. His appearance in London may
objectivity, very anti-cozy, similar in type to the feeling prove to be the most interesting debut by a foreign
projected by many Surrealist paintings. But always, artist since Kitaj's. D

Icarus 1965 Inverted Personnage 1965
Painted wood and rice paper Painted on wood
98 X 101 in. 84 X 36 1n .

101