Page 50 - Studio International - February 1967

London commentary by Terence Ibbott
Jhala 1967
Edward Lucie-Smith Oil on canvas
75 x 69 in.
Below
William Gear
Square Landscape 1966
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 in.

System painting

The galleries are sluggish at this time of year, and,
in any case, painting itself seems to be going
through a period of hibernation. The one thing
that continues to gain ground is what I may as well
call 'system' painting, for want of some better or
more expressive label. The AXIOM GALLERY have
been supporters of this tendency ever since they
opened, and their current show of three young
artists doesn't deviate much from the expected
line. Of the three, the most interesting is James
Moyses. Moyses says, in a statement: Tor the last
eighteen months I have been working with the
colour triangle of white-red-black, painting tone
range situations which through interaction indi-
cated values between red and grey with tonal
equivalence ... ' This sounds a little like the scien-
tist struggling to make himself understood by the
layman, and indeed this is just the kind of relation-
ship which Moyses sets up between himself and the
spectator. He expresses what he is doing in alge-
braic formulae, and the kind of question he asks
himself is this: 'If a painting has two colours in it,
and if, in the case of one of these colours, the tone
varies while intensity and hue remain constant;
and, in the case of the other, the intensity varies
while tone and hue remain the same—what will
happen ?' The result, after so much cerebration, is
oddly sensual. One picture has a graded procession
of tones across the surface which is one of the
subtlest things of its sort that I've ever seen. The
paint is not slicked down and mechanical, but has
a quality and life of its own.
If Moyses seems the most interesting of the three
at the moment, the others are not too far behind.
John McClean (currently teaching art history at
Chelsea) is a painter in the modified Op manner— Left, S. W. Hayter, whose paintings of the past
that is, instead of a violent wrenching movement decade are on show at the Grosvenor Gallery from
of shapes he prefers to create a kind of mild surface February 16 to March 11—of the works in the
exhibition the artist says 'these paintings were
shimmer by the use of dissonant colours which are
made between 1957 and 1967 and they are
still very close to one another in tone and intensity.
predominantly linear. Lines convey motion and
The results are clean and zestful. direction as in life—even the one-way motion of
Terence Ibbott, who won a major prize at last time. The systems of line are like nets which enable
us to see the wind and feel the wave. The rhythm of
year's Young Contemporaries, and is now a post-
underlying wave fields is more or less concealed in
graduate student at the Slade, is a more complex,
the earlier works by apparently random transparency
and a somewhat more traditional kind of abstract of surface but in the later works, it is clearly seen
painter. His jagged zigzag shapes set up a series through interference of parallel lines of unmixed
of rhythms and counter rhythms that move across colour'.
the surface of the picture. In this he resembles, from
the little I was able to see in advance, the new work
which William Gear is about to show at the