Page 28 - Studio International - March 1967

ently unbounded complexity a hologram is only an way. It is just in that time that there have been several
exaggerated example of very general tendencies in the important movements in painting which have produced
appearance of modern scientific visual documents. Most unfocused, all-over textural works, which are in strong
science nowadays does not deal with simple precise contrast to the sharp clean lines of the dominant school of
shapes with hard edges and solidly moulded contours. abstractionists in the thirties or even to the firmly drawn
Billiard ball atoms have been replaced by clouds of electri- objects in surrealist paintings. Early as opposed to late
cal density; we are less interested in bones than in the Kandinskys have come into fashion again. The two paint-
nebulous assemblages of cells which clothe and penetrate ings by Mark Tobey reproduced here illustrate this
them; instead of recording our results in the form of a change in progress, and Dubuffet's Texturology is an
smooth curve drawn through a number of points on a extreme though not untypical representative of its end
graph, we find ourselves provided with the waggly point. Painters, I think, would not have devoted their
jiggling line drawn by a continuous reading apparatus; energies to such works unless they had acquired from
and so on, and so on. somewhere the feeling that such apparently chaotic
It is in the last quarter of a century, in particular, that assemblages of small flakes of colour and tone could carry
the 'typical' scientific image has been transformed in this some significance. There was, of course, a period towards