Page 51 - Studio International - April 1967

sequence of violent actions. Or else we track in climate. His surrealist landscapes remind me of the he has been experimenting with for some years.
upon some event. Often the paintings give the way Max Ernst was painting in the early 'thirties. The present series are large rectangles with one
impression that we are looking at things through Yet he takes this apparently exhausted style by corner clipped, and at the same time thrust forward.
powerful field-glasses. Violence is very near, yet the scruff of its neck, and shakes new life into it. This clipped corner presents a narrow plane of
also very far removed. All of this is done with His paintings are impeccable in their craftsman- colour to the spectator, the little hard rectangle
much adroitness—the figures are a nice compromise ship, and quite fascinating in the repertoire of usually contrasts in hue as well as in other
between painterly blots and photographic repre- forms employed. Each landscape seems, if rather respects with the larger softer area which makes
sentations, partaking of the fascination of both. strange, naturalistic— but as one looks, one realizes up the main surface (literally softer—the shape of
Yet there's something rather strained, rather voulu that this is an illusion. Each is filled with swarming the stretcher makes the canvas bulge and curve).
about it all. The cleverness and dexterity are too geometric shapes, and these shapes have an inde- After moving away from the idea of painterliness,
insistent. pendent or 'abstract' life and movement of their Smith now seems to be returning to it again. The
own. The result is fruitfully ambiguous—the colours are not flat and undifferentiated, but
At the I.C.A., there is rather a mixed bag of pictures shift and change character as one looks infinitely subtle stainings, refined and vaporous.
figurative painters. Patricia Douthwaite shows at them. Kitchen is very young, and it's difficult When paintings are shown in a developing series,
some striking canvases which lean a little too to paint with such intensity for years at a time— as these are, it's hard to make up one's mind pre-
heavily on the early Hockney, Ian Drury some one wonders how he will develop. But these cisely what weight to give to each individual work.
rather dull Pop portraits. Stass Paraskos, who was pictures are already a considerable achievement. At the moment, the Kasmin Gallery has the air of
recently prosecuted on an obscenity charge in being a total event, an environment, rather than
Leeds, exhibits some lyrically charming and Painting of this sort makes a startling contrast an exhibition of pictures. And perhaps, in a way,
innocent pictures. The most interesting of the four with the kind of work which (for example) Richard this is a compliment. When you are standing
painters on view, however, is Herbert Kitchen. Smith is now doing. Smith, in his new show at there, it's hard to think of painting as having any
Kitchen is a kind of sport in the present artistic KASMIN's, continues with the shaped canvases which other vocabulary than this rather narrow one.

Stass Paraskos Girls and flowers
Oil on canvas, 48 x 24 in.

Left, Juan Genoves Beyond the limit 1966
Oil on canvas, 51⅛ x 43¼ in.