Page 51 - Studio International - November 1966

experimenting in what one might call the Calder-Caro to project from the wall, and yet asserts its own flatness.
area, and with rather interesting results. Basically, what The painted areas are given a cunning false perspective,
Kaine does is to construct a framework, to which certain so that they seem to lean away from the framework of
flat areas are attached. The picture becomes an emblem rods which supports them.
to be hung on the wall—the wall shows through the All this, of course, is still firmly centred on the great
picture, as well as around it. The notion is a trifle like the debate—the argument about modes of perception. The
one which the American artist Frank Stella (being shown thing which bothers me about Kaine's work, much as it
at the KASMIN GALLERY this November) was playing with intrigues me, is the fact that it's so much a commentary
some time back, when he left a great hole in the middle of on the medium and the métier and the purely physical
the picture. But Kaine isn't interested, as I think Stella process of seeing. It sometimes seems to me that all the
is, in the idea of 'a something' surrounding and defining new painters I encounter are like so many angels dancing
`a nothing'. Instead, he's much more straightforwardly on the point of the same pin. Ours is on the whole an
concerned with the idea of illusion. His most recent exclusive, a reductive art. I'm beginning to wonder if
paintings form a series of 'impossible' objects. Every- the process of reduction can or will be reversed—and what
thing we see is contradictory. The flat construction seems will happen if it isn't. q

John Kaine
Flag 1 1966
Oil on hardboard and metal
tubing
5 ft x 2 ft 10 in.
Collection: Peter Beale

John Kaine
Flag 6 1966
Oil on hardboard and metal
tubing
5 ft 1/2 in. x 3 ft 9 1/2 in.