Page 48 - Studio International - November 1968

Peter Sedgley: new works 1968 at the Peter Sedgley
Redfern Gallery, November 5-6 detail from Cosmos video-rotor 1968
fluorescent colour with ultra-violet illumination
Peter Sedgley's latest works, which he calls 'video- 6 ft diam.
rotors', consist of revolving discs covered with tiny Redfern Gallery
rectangular patches of red, yellow, blue and green
fluorescent paint. The patches are arranged in
concentric rows. As the discs rotate, ultra-violet
and stroboscopic light is made to play on them. The
result is a sort of colour ballet—or, more flippantly,
a tropical rush-hour. As the stroboscopic flash
causes certain sections of the disc to disappear
momentarily, different areas of the disc appear to
move now faster, now slower than they should, and
even to go in the reverse direction to the disc itself.
By varying the speed of the disc, a complex pattern
of colour and movement is set up. Light and move-
ment have thus transformed the simple elements
on the picture surface and made of them, as it were,
a third thing which appears to detach itself from
the picture surface and pulsate with a life of its own.
This third thing is not just the sum of the elements
or the elements in motion: it is something new, the
product, as it were. Sedgley calls it the 'character-
istic' and it is with this that he is primarily interested.
Sedgley is prepared to accept the analogy with
dancing and refers to the complex movements as
choreography. But he himself prefers to regard his
video-rotors as 'boggie woggies', a reference not
only to the syncopated rhythms of jazz, but also to
the later works of Mondrian. The comparison is
just. It is tempting to speculate whether Mondrian
might not, had he lived, have developed along
lines similar to those taken by Sedgley.
The line of development stretches back through
Mondrian to the pointillists. Like them Sedgley is
more concerned with visual experience than with
objects. His video-rotors carry the break-down of
the object and the concern for the psychological
effects of colour mixture a stage further. Yet how-
ever interesting these effects may be in themselves
—the way green and yellow at a certain speed
appear white, etc.—they are subordinate to his
major interest which is with the structure of colour
and with the building-up of a scale, a key-board
of colour.
Since 1964, Peter Sedgley has been working with
concentric rings of colour. He finds the circle a
good shape to work with because it is 'anonymous',
that is homogeneous, with no variation in outline.
This allows him to concentrate on colour and give
the minimum of attention to shape.
His first circle pictures were soft-edged, sprayed.
Last year he began experimenting with the effects
of coloured lights on his colour circles. By pro-
gramming three lights—red, yellow and blue—to
shine on the canvas either singly or in combination, appeared, reappeared faintly, suddenly etc. The
and gradually to attack and decay, he produced video-rotors in which the disc itself rotates are a
colour compositions which developed over a period development from these.
of time: colours grew in intensity, faded, dis- Cyril Barrett

'Poet's choice' at the A.I.A. Gallery one reason why painting and poetry have tended extremely traditional figurative painter, in the
- until November 2 to draw apart has been the rejection, on the part of person of Harold Cheesman, and balances this
English poets, of the idea of modernism, which yet against the informal abstractions of Jan Le Witt,
It is a little difficult to review an exhibition fairly remains so powerful in the visual arts. It's notable, thus seeming to sum up the choices which were
when one's own choices make up a quarter of its for example, that not only does Mr Fuller choose open to painters in England during the nineteen-
contents. Yet, even if I were not one of the selectors, two figurative artists (Keith Vaughan and Edward fifties. My own choices, and those of Adrian Henri,
I should recommend the A.I.A. Gallery's 'Poet's Middleditch), but he seems, in his heart, to feel represent another pair of oppositions: on the one
Choice' exhibition as a worthwhile experiment. that all successful painting is figurative, and, more hand the tradition of Pop art, and on the other,
Roy Fuller, the senior poet involved, remarks in a than this, literary. He quotes Sickert's opinion that minimality and kinetics. Henri, a painter as well
catalogue note that 'one feels that the relations `all decent painters were literary painters', and in as a poet, has chosen two colleagues from Liver-
between the poets and painters of an epoch ought the poem he appends to his introduction, he re- pool, one of whom also writes poetry. His intro-
to be close', but notes ruefully, in the next sen- marks 'you can't/Have art be about nothing'. ductory poems, and the pictures, taken together,
tence, that 'since the war this has not been so'. John Smith, representing the next generation (he do seem to supply evidence of an organic com-
These observations are undoubtedly true. Perhaps is a dozen years younger than Fuller) picks one munity of writers and artists, of a kind which
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