Page 35 - Studio International - November 1968

Ian Stephenson's recent paintings are on exhibition at the New Art Centre,
There are other pictures of 1955-6 where the reverse happens—a
Sloane St, London, S.W.1 from 13 November until 7 December
panel is mounted on another larger panel and the picture absorbs
this change of plane, builds itself into the mount.
There is a real drive for clarification in these modest pictures and
for a hold on certain ideas central to the modern tradition. Much
derives from cubism : their tough shallow relief, their paradoxical
transparency, their tonality and subject matter. But there is nothing
here that is academic, no interest at all in the ideal framework of
cubism, nor for cubist-style deformations or shapiness. The ideas
are worked on from the inside.
He does not commit himself to a masterful idea of what a picture
should be but rather to certain fields of choice, certain processes
Facing page Abstract 1956 12¾ x 9¾ in. oil on hardboard and wood frame
built on a neutral base. The cubist content is linked with an aware-
Below Abstraction: Flow 1957 oil on hardboard 48 x 24 in. ness of the cubist background in impressionism. The touches out of
Coll : Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Purchase Nominations Scheme 1960) which the pictures are made have more in common with the flat
optical screen of impressionism than with cubist hatching.
These dots, while evoking space and light, are amassed as if in some
calm argument with the support, agreeing, contradicting, develop-
ing its surface or firmly deflecting it. Often there are exchanges
between the paint-colour and the self-colour of the surface painted.
This collaboration (to use Rauschenberg's term which is altogether
appropriate) takes more complicated forms when some time later he
uses a box or a bread-board as his support, or mounts a wooden set
square or an old palette within the picture. He is anxious to break
the spell of the frame and to free the painting process and its power
to mediate between matter and idea.
In the earliest pictures the dots of colour are related to the familiar
pictorial alternatives of solid and void. But in a picture called
Abstraction: Flow of 1957 the marks are no longer harnessed to forms
within an illusionistic space. They operate on the surface, making
their own movements, their own scales, flowing in streams between
the more solidly painted ochre blocks, some dispersed in drifts,
others filling space in open mesh-like layers. And out of this shift
there arise new dialogues between the marks and the surfaces they
are painted on.
The solid areas can be thought of as rocks or baffles. It is as though
a different class of object had been placed there in the midst of the
picture. And indeed the activity of the picture can be seen as stem-
ming from this juxtaposition as though the whole was a field of
energy within which certain events and processes determine the
final appearance.
Process becomes more and more important during the years that
follow. It is no simple matter. As the elements of the picture become
more autonomous, more bald, so does the interplay between reality
and illusion become more complex. An important group of pictures
of 1959 carries his earlier explorations of picture surface and frame
to a new point. Here the supports are broken and remounted, as if
two pictures were being brought together with a critical impact.
Real space invades a picture and then becomes the pictorial space of
another picture. Dots are slugs of paint, lumps applied with the
brush, and in a raking light they can be seen in toothed relief, some-
times white on white, in palpable contrast to thin washes and
spatters elsewhere.
In Refracted Forms the central panels stand in relief against the
larger panel. The free-standing solid quality of these central panels
is enhanced by a painted rectangle, like a shadow askew behind it,
which sets it floating forward. At the same time the shapes within it
render it transparent—we see the bent corner of a further rectangle
inside and this is painted with such close-knit density that it seems to
overwhelm the reality of the raised panel, just as a view can over-
whelm the reality of the window we are looking through. Meanwhile,
over, among, across these events there swarm the fat slugs of paint,
the dots, sometimes a part of these forms, clustered like bees, some-
times scattered in abrasive clouds.
Stephenson spent the winter of 1958-9 in Italy and on his return he