Page 62 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

intrusion on the plastic simplicity of design. It mere technique of overpainting, of casting sug- delineated segments. The elisions between them
makes the difference between a 'composed' picture gestive shadows over the centralized core of each are made in terms of intense colour. Blazing pinks,
and an acted-out sentiment. painting, Louis offers a brooding obligato to the oranges and scarlets are ingeniously related to the
Within the limitations of black-to-white, Kline swaying rhythms beneath. light-saturated mixtures likely to be found in hot
found many ways of suggesting levels in space, In mood, Louis's paintings have always struck countries, in places where colour recedes before
ranging from extensive matt effects to thick im- me as more related to the pervasive, quavering the fierce power of the sun. Ferren's heavier and
pastoes, from thinned and scumbled surfaces to symbolist atmosphere— Maeterlinck— than to the lighter accents are bold, and sometimes even
shiny, impenetrable surfaces. Even in the scores of harsh Wittgensteinian realities his brothers-in- jarring, and this has always been true of his best
preliminary sketches, where you can sense him arms deal with. Certainly these paintings, with work. In the midst of the splendours of Oriental
thinking with his brush, these instinctive devices their equivocal looming central shadows, and the colour, an acerbic thrust rescues his canvases from
are brought into play so that no single drawing, no fragility of the flaring boundaries of his image, are the static elements of ornament.
matter how casual, is merely a black sign on a `painterly' and evocative, rather than factual and
bearer surface. immediate. Two sculptors, José de Rivera and Roy Gussow,
In his few sorties into colour, Kline failed to are currently in the news, being responsible for the
achieve the spatial grandeur endemic to his style. Ellsworth Kelly has been engaged in puritanical first contemporary sculpture to be installed on
His paintings in colour are rather coloured draw- pursuits for many years. His consistent search for Washington's Mall, and the largest ever commis-
ings in which hesitation and insecurity are all too the simplest means possible for stirring the senses sioned by our federal government. The sculpture,
readable. But I would not tax him with this failure. reaches back to his youthful studies in Paris when, conceived by José de Rivera and executed with the
His successes are too valuable. even in the thrall of Matisse's glorious last works, help of Roy Gussow, is a stainless steel arabesque
Kelly tried to eliminate all but the essential rect- in de Rivera's characteristic vein, measuring 16 ft
I can say the same about Sam Francis, whose angle and its coloured plane surface in his own long by 13 ft wide by 8 ft high, and symbolizes
exhibition at the PIERRE MATISSE GALLERY was a work. `space, time and technology' according to the archi-
buoyant, unpretentious affair in which Francis's The logical result of Kelly's self-imposed auster- tect Walker 0. Cain.
peculiar sensibility to colour, light, and, above all, ity programme is his exhibition at the SIDNEY The two sculptors also collaborated on a hand-
space is expressed with absolute clarity. Now in JANIS GALLERY. It is composed almost entirely of some exhibition at the GRACE BORGENICHT GALLERY
his mid-forties, Francis has reached a precision of ensembles of separate single-colour canvases, where the maquette for the commission was
feeling quite similar to Kline's during the decade grouped with unfailing tact to produce a wide exhibited along with some eighteen smaller pieces
of his forties. variety of visual satisfactions. showing the individuality of each artist.
The quality of Francis's spaces is obviously com- The tour-de-force of the exhibition is a thirteen José de Rivera's forged arabesques, their slender
pletely different. Francis soars more into the panel composition precisely titled Spectrum in which flanks resounding light as they slowly revolve,
pristine Mallarméan empyrean. He knows the Kelly's colour instinct—for what else can we call his have always impressed me. Even if I didn't know
value of silences. He knows the suggestiveness of astonishing rightness in this area ?— triumphs. that his bronze and stainless steel rods are pains-
transparencies. While he doesn't hesitate to sug- Quite aside from the pleasing illusion (the narrow takingly shaped by hand, I would sense it. The
gest such banal analogies as soap bubbles, or, as he vertical panels seem columnar when viewed from nuances in the swelling and thinning of his linear
calls his works on paper, Bright Ring Drawings, there the side), there is an intensity of feeling resident in visions could never be achieved in machine-
are far more subtle allusions of a poetical nature. the panels themselves from which everything turning. And it is in the nuances—those volumes
The spaces Francis articulates in his most recent except the effulgence of colour is banned. spelled out with infinite light-handedness—that de
paintings are near enclaves of white bounded His intention is more apparent in the largest Rivera's value lies.
sparsely by brilliant fragments of colour. But diptychs where the scale of two identical squarish Yes, he is elegant, which is sometimes called his
Francis, while enclosing on three sides, always canvases, as in a blue and grass-green juxtaposition, weakness. But elegance need not be a hindrance to
leaves a point of issue. Those white lakes expanding makes them assume a solid identity. I attribute the the expression of a vision. In de Rivera's case, I
from the centre spill out into infinity (as we are overwhelming presence of these simple juxta- think it is not. He can take a rod, forge two loops
told they represent by the few judiciously measured positions partly to Kelly's consummate craft: in in it and allow it to taper off into space in such a
drops of scarlet, blue and yellow within the silent covering his surfaces with oil paint, Kelly does not way that the narrow metal line encompasses an
centre). Scale here is determined with a finesse and lose the maximum energy of the matter itself. He is enormous amount of space circumscribing it.
assurance Francis never had before. able to preserve the vitality of chroma even when Those full virtual volumes surrounding each small
If Francis's paintings are first achievements of an he obviously must use layer upon layer to reach piece are visions of a pure, cleansed and vast
immediate, sensuous order, they are also fine the opacity his compositions require. enclave in a wasteland of visual clutter.
expressions of a poetic sensibility, in which meta- I suppose much can be said about the laws of Gussow works differently. His dematerializations
phor resides calmly in the heart of things, but colour or the weights and relative equilibrium of occur through the juxtaposition of highly-polished
never intrudes unduly on the immediate picture blacks and whites in Kelly's work, but I am con- volumes—solid volumes—that mirror and echo
plane. vinced that Kelly is indifferent to colour theory, each other and then reverberate in widening arcs
and that his eminent success springs entirely from around each piece. Two forms, juxtaposed in such
Oddly enough, the group of Morris Louis paint- a highly-educated emotion concerning the value, a way that their curving walls produce auxiliary
ings shown at the ANDRE EMMERICH GALLERY also the sensuous value, of animated colour weighed forms in reflection, can seem at once solid and
refer us back to a moment when metaphor was out in aesthetically precise doses. weighty, and utterly two-dimensional, depending
still inherent in many painters' work. Despite on many factors, the most important being light.
Louis's link with the tribe of 'post-painterly John Ferren's new work at the ROSE FRIED Gussow does not use mechanical movement, un-
abstractionists', his imagination kept crowding GALLERY has been quite rightly associated with his like de Rivera, but he is clearly preoccupied with
him toward an older corner of the world where year's stay in Lebanon a while back, but it must the energies that can be derived and controlled
associations could not be denied to the image. also be remembered that Ferren was among the from the environs.
Known as the Aleph Series (no explanation offered), first of the abstract expressionists to turn to centred
the eight large paintings were done in 1960, two images with symbolist overtones. The Byzantine
years before Louis's death. Certainly Louis's chief mandorla that appears in several of his new paintings
critic, Clement Greenberg, was right to stress the was already implicit in his work of more than a
pure beauty of colour as the primary value of these decade ago.
paintings. But Louis's colour instinct, lovely as it These new paintings are rather complicated.
was, is not the only element at work here. By the Ferren divides up his canvases into sharply-
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