Page 38 - Studio International - November 1968

settled in London. The new work (which was shown at the New Arts Facing page Diorama SS.1.67 1967 oil with enamel on two canvases, each
Centre in 1962 along with the earlier 'divided' paintings) seems to 66 x 66 in.
be painted in a new mood. Larger than anything he had done before Below Polychromatic G 1961 oil on canvas 50 x 50 in.
it also explores a lighter, more chromatic palette. There is still the Coll : The Tate Ga lery, London
same emphasis on process and on the particular circumstances of
Bottom Refracted Forms 1959 oil on wood panels and quarterboard 27 x 24 in.
each painting; and the same thoughtful interplay between the given Coll : Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Purchase Nominations Scheme 1960)
facts of paint and canvas on the one hand and concepts of space and
light and movement on the other. But there is perhaps a looser pro-
gramme. He does not seem to be setting the pictures up quite so
deliberately but rather allowing them to find their own forms out of
the momentum of making. The area of choice is different, to be
located fully within the making of the picture.
In pictures like the Tate's Polychromatic G or Burnt Penumbra (C.A.S.)
it is impossible to get away from the impression that these are
interiors; or that the canvas has been given the value of a light-filled
room. A simple division might seem to establish the presence of a
wall. There are suggestions of shadows, of depths and juxtapositions
in space with marked changes of scale. Now the dots are often flicked
on, not brushed, and they cover great areas of the canvas sometimes
concentrated into particular shapes like nebulae, sometimes drawn
thin and pervasive like light itself. The picture surface is alive with
incident of a minute kind and one can pass from an almost cosmic
openness to a surface teeming with particular dots, stencilled letters
or miniscule inscriptions, dashes, accents.
With the new technique of flicked or sprayed paint he was com-
mitting himself even further to the painting process as the source of
his images. The element of personal structuring in the paint is now
less, and, as the details of the surface become more randomized,
less composed, so the totality of the painting becomes more parti-
cular, more 'real'. These images are unforseeable. They are imper-
sonal and unprecedentedly particular. And yet there is room in them
for enormously enhanced references. The letter G in the Tate's
picture, he told the compiler of the Tate Catalogue, could stand
equally for gravity, Gagarin or Giusti. The three possibilities are
typical of his imaginative relationship to painting. You could say that
gravity stands for the physical history of the picture, its presence.
Gagarin perhaps indicates both the moment when the picture was
painted and more generally his long-standing interest in modern
cosmology. Giusti, the maker's name of a famous ecorché figure,
stands for the circumstances of the studio—he has a plaster of it and
several pictures relate to it and its shadows—and also to his awareness
of the past, his sense of time. The list could be extended.
Pictures of nothing which are about everything. Pictures of limitless
scale which are pictures of minute particulars. Countless happenings
in time present as one simultaneous appearance. Emptiness filled
with matter. Solids filled with space. The technique of spraying
opened up countless new possibilities. It was neutral and direct; it
relieved him of the last compositional anxieties. No need now to set
up pictorial propositions by main force. Simply putting on paint
revealed the nature of painting from a new angle : paint as falling,
dust if you like, or rain or light; the canvas as receptive surface, a
wall, a floor to be sifted over, shadowed, screened, exposed, developed
like a sensitive paper.
Painting equals obliteration (like painting a mantelpiece or a chest
of drawers). Seen like this the familiar reciprocity of canvas and
picture takes on a new vitality: as the canvas is obliterated or
emptied, so the picture is revealed or filled up. The process can be
speeded up or slowed down with big or little splashes, controlled
(aimed) or suspended (masked). There are photographs of the
Stuyvesant Collection Sfumato in progress, showing the canvas flat on
the floor and assembled on it are papers masking off the central area
and grouped round its periphery various cut-outs and objects—
carrier bags, toilet rolls, cartons, boxes— that constituted the masking
material at that moment. When the picture was shown at the New
Art Centre in 1964 it presented a surface alive with stencilled inci-
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