Page 50 - Studio International - March 1967

craft on Venus? Or an abstract statement about teacup which appeared in one of the earliest Terry Setch at the GRABOWSKI GALLERY has come
our perception of colour ? More probably the Surrealist exhibitions has spawned a strange des- up with a group of paintings which seem to blend
latter. In Walker's work a struggle is going on cendant. Also in the show are a whole series of a number of different influences. The easiest com-
between surrealist imagery and pure abstraction. drawings, many of Bertram Mills Circus, by Peter parison is with paintings by Patrick Caulfield,
It gives an undoubted edge to this work. Indeed, Blake, and one or two works by Richard Hamilton. though it's also possible to detect the influence of
his is perhaps the most interesting debut in London The Blake drawings are unselfconsciously tradi- Roy Lichtenstein. What Setch does is to play off
for some time. tional. Blake brings to them all the loving parti- an abstract or 'patterned' background against
At the ROWAN is another 'new' artist—John cularity one finds in Victorian draughtsmen. The another event in the foreground. Sometimes he
Edwards, with large simple abstractions in rather Hamilton include two versions of his 'Hugh will use figurative imagery—grapes, apples and
sombre colours. Edwards is by no means so Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland', done bananas, or a treetrunk. At other times the refer-
mature an artist as Walker, but he has a fine some years back. They still look surprisingly good, ence is more abstract, to Pollock's 'Blue Poles'
colour sense, if at present one of a rather limited even though the occasion for their making has for instance. Some time ago Lichtenstein painted
kind. It's always difficult to predict the future of passed. a series of pictures in which the dashing Abstract
young abstract artists—the feeling for 'pure' shape At the LEICESTER GALLERIES, a draughtsman Expressionist brush-stroke was made to conform
and 'pure' colour is always a chancy one. But whose work would look very much at home with to the comic-strip conventions which he had
here's a promising beginning. Peter Blake's—Camille Pissarro. The group of already patented. The result was an aesthetic
Colin Self, though a relative newcomer, can drawings on view has a particular interest because clash, a dissonance of shape and meaning. Caul-
hardly be said to count as a beginner. His sleek so many of them are of members of the Pissarro field, too, deals in dissonances, in his still-lives
drawings, with overtones of the jazz-age and the family—and also because so many of them come with their heavy black outlines, their deliberate
chromium painted thirties, have already made him from early in the artist's career, even going back banality of content. Setch takes both of these
well-known. Indeed, he's the sort of artist who to his days in the West Indies. The tone is far techniques and tries to take them further. The
makes addicts rather than collectors. His sculptures from revolutionary. Pissarro was a rather plodding insistent patterns dissolve our awareness of what is
and assemblages have been less often seen than draughtsman, but the drawings have a certain in front—each picture presents us with at least
his drawings. At the present moment the ROBERT charm. They reveal, for one thing, how closely two layers of imagery, seemingly quite separate
FRASER GALLERY have a large and alarming one—a connected Pissarro's art is to that of J. F. Millet. from one another, and it is impossible to focus on
coal-black dog in a kind of den of black upholstery; His peasants, and Millet's, are brothers and sisters. both at once. The result is to set up a series of
he is accompanied by miniature guided-missiles with the same slow, heavy, earthbound gestures, tensions, and these tensions, I imagine, are the
and flashing red lights. One feels that the fur Impressionism here looks backward, not forward. real subject.
Like the work of Frank Stella (otherwise, of
course, a great deal more austere) this follows the
current tendency towards creating art which is
exclusively about art, and this is a development
which I regard with some suspicion. Nevertheless
this is an interesting show with a good deal of
vigour about it.
Finally, at the INDICA GALLERY, a series of works
in Perspex by Lourdes Castro. It's hard to know
whether these are very modern or very old-
fashioned. The artist captures a silhouette—a
figure, a pair of figures—by cutting it out of a
sheet of coloured perspex. Sometimes the image is
positive, sometimes negative. Sometimes two
images overlap. There are one or two amusing
concepts, like a transparent carrier bag full of
transparent shopping. Miss Castro has a sharp
and amusing gift for observation. Her silhouettes,
based on the shadows cast by the objects, are cut
with a sure and steady hand. Everything is very
well made. But basically what she is doing is
draughtsmanship of a throughly naturalistic sort.
It is the equivalent of top-flight magazine-
illustration. q

Lourdes Castro
Ombre portée beige positif et négatif avec contour 1966
Plexiglass and paint
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in.