Page 40 - Studio International - June 1967

been made with brush and hand become structural com-
ponents that are line or texture. The softly-painted jug
and fruit of the mid- to late-twenties become the high-
tension line or the apparently abstract unit of colour;
juxtaposed objects on a table become the apparently
abstract composition in two or three dimensions.
There is, in this new order, no loss of graciousness, no
petrification. What happens is the opposite: the new
clarity of information in Nicholson's work permits ambi-
guities and paradoxes of various kinds. The idiom of his
forms, whether so-called abstract or referential, hovers
between the formal and the informal. Illusions of space
are often indicated by the subject matter; always there
are conflicting sorts of space offered by the elements
themselves—line space, planal space, colour space, tex-
ture space. Internal scale acts against physical size.
Actual material is denied by apparent matter: hardboard
plus rubbed-in pigment minus scraped-off surface equals
granite; a few inches plus mise en scène equals monumen-
tality. Sometimes, before even one of Nicholson's most
severe reliefs, however laboriously carved from a slab of
mahogany and however firmly constructed visually, I
find myself beset by the notion that these are all the most
delicate and immaterial things, balanced like the angelic
host on the point of a pin, but a pin that the magician
removed when he had finished.
The artist I see, then, is the great synthetist Theoreti-
cally one might have assumed that Nicholson belongs to
too early a generation to affect a usable synthesis;
certainly he was surrounded by men engaged in analysis
or in exploiting the analyses of others. Yet one hesitates to

Locmariaquer 4 1967 relief and oil 48 x 38⅜ in.
Illustrations on this and facing page
courtesy Marlborough Fine Art Ltd.
Below Zennor Quoit 2 1966 relief and oil 46⅛ x 103⅛ in.