Page 40 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Patrick Procktor's new paintings

Robert Hughes

When first seen, Patrick Procktor's new paintings (cur- neutral, formal. In a strict sense, they are about the
rently on view at the REDFERN GALLERY) seem to exhale impossibility of history, because they refuse to interpret the
a rank, foxy whiff of documentary. Cunning Mr Procktor, events and personages they suggest. Procktor's response
with his contemporary relevance, his hints at sociologiz- to violence is to say that he does not understand it, which
ing about the disaffections of youth, his Red Guards and in turn becomes a refusal to understand in order to
leather boys ! propagate a core of mystery at the centre of his images.
And certainly there is a documentary flavour, in the The method is theatrical—which, in Procktor's terms,
sense that each of Procktor's paintings takes for image a is no insult. Figures, small in scale, some half-transparent,
subject already made familiar by the press. (In fact, some solid, and some merging into one another, are
several of the smaller pictures, and numerous elements of dotted around large empty rooms; the perspective of the
the larger, are lifted directly from photos of Red Guards ceiling and the tilted floor has the same kind of cramped,
which have appeared so often that they are nearly as isolating function which pittura metafisica discovered in
familiar as Capa's shot of the dying Republican soldier.) the Baroque stage. Some figures are reduced to uniforms,
But Procktor is less fascinated by the immediacy of floating in clumsy postures with no body inside them.
documentary images than by their thinness, evanes- (One would like to be sure whether Procktor was using
cence and actual blankness: the way in which the grey this excruciatingly banal device ironically, or whether he
smear on newsprint or the blue ghost on the telly seems thought it really had something to say about the uniform-
to bring us closer to events we do not understand. kinkery of Rockers. Perhaps, in view of the other ironies
To this remoteness is added another. To a fairly afflu- and distancing techniques in his work, one may assume
ent, bourgeois audience—which, I take it, is the audience the former.) The result is both pullulating and dream-
which mainly goes to the Redfern — the Red Guard and like; Procktor's enormous room full of leather boys is not
the leather boy are uncomfortable spectres of history. so much a composition as an accretion, for the figures
They have no personality; instead, they exist only in hardly relate to one another at all except through linking
terms of a set of hostile actions. Whether he is chanting gestures and their simultaneous, and as it were accidental,
slogans in a Peking square under the looming poly- presence on that wide blue field. It is not necessary to
chrome face of Comrade Mao, or apathetically slouched subject such paintings to a theory of alienation in order
on a bar in a chrome-studded leather jacket studying the to see how the hallucinatory space, and the lack of con-
pimply face of his gang-mate, Procktor's human figure is tact or meeting between the figures in it, conjure up
the focus for a whole flock of random emotions which vistas of loneliness and boredom, the self-conscious ennui
have to do with a violence which neither he nor his of queer bars and motorbike calls.
audience has actually experienced. Not real boys, but The look of Procktor's paintings has changed radically
phenomena. At the same time, the paintings are not in the last three years. What remains from his first show
meant to be simply triggers for whatever you might at the Redfern is the box-structure, in which figures are
happen to feel about their subjects—and this is fortunate, isolated. But the figures themselves have lost their
for some elements in them could, under those conditions, grotesque aspect—none of Procktor's expressionist distor-
slip disastrously into political caricature; would dissolve tions of face and body survive—and the paint is no longer
as an image if the line of Red Guards standing on the dark, glutinous and flurried. Instead, it is applied with a
tilted pictures of ancient gods were experienced as the kind of nonchalance, in thin transparent washes and
New Regime Trampling Down The Old, although stains. (The staining, of course, neither derives from
that is how a Red Guard would probably interpret it. Louis nor is intended to have the same formal purpose.
In fact, Procktor is maintaining a balance which is not It acts more as an enlarged watercolour drawing.) With-
as difficult to hold as it seems. The morphology of in this framework of light touches, whose medium has no
violence does not interest him in the least, and there's no expressive value in itself, Procktor is able to pursue a
indication of masochism in the paintings; the most they number of tantalizing minor ambiguities, 'asides' on the
give out in that direction is a mild, playful leather- use of style—shifts into a coarsened or more conventional-
fetishism. Nor is he a historical painter—not, at least, in ized style of drawing, puns between the medium and the
any conventional sense of supplying information or illusion it produces. Its non-committal implication is
opinions about the themes he paints: David's Marat or a key to this highly intelligent painter's new work: 'I
Gros' Napoleon at Jaffa have a definite position to history, am less involved than you think a painter should be.' q
Procktor's pictures of Red Guards have none, they are