Page 61 - Studio International - October1968

Terry Setch and Alan Wood
at Grabowski Gallery
1 October-29 November

The current show at the GRABOWSKI GALLERY
brings together two of this year's national prize-
winners, Terry Setch, who was awarded the senior
prize at the Royal National Eisteddfod, and Alan
Wood, who shared the first prize with Harold
Cohen and Michael Simpson at the Northern
Ireland Arts Council Open Exhibition at Belfast.
Setch's previously exhibited works have shown his
ever-increasing concern with the art content in
`Home Art'. Early works included ritual objects for
the solace and comfort of the homemaker; some
tawdry element of the materialist bazaar, elevated
to totemistic significance by an injection of ART.
To imbue life with significance, to declare your pre-
tentions— take a slug of culture. Home is the theatre
of effect, the plastic battleground of cultural
neurosis. Setch's new works continue in this vein,
opening up the unreason of living with a precise
and calculated surgery. The motifs are derived
from 'art cliches', and he is concerned with decora-
tion as applied to artifacts, and particularly
enamoured of combinations of different styles and
motifs in one object and/or surface. He sees all
around him the restatement of Art Styles through
mass-produced means, and restates it yet again, in
cryptic equations, with panache and not without
humour; `tarting up' becomes `arting up' becomes
Art. We see all around us the drab lowest common
denominators of decorative inadequacy—The
`Manessier' carpets, the 'Pollock' textiles, Mon-
driaan pullovers and Art Nouveau everything.
The Wall series continues in a splendid fugue. The
wall is considered as a surface pattern, referential to
printed stone wall images (on paper), reminiscent
of rusticated hand-built solemnity or the tidy
fabrication of time-and-motion bricklaying. In
Wallscape (1968) he elaborates one of his favourite
devices, inventing a level of abstraction for two wall
motifs, superimposing the two disparate elements.
This method of interlock and overlay, improvising
on two systems simultaneously, requires virtuoso
capacity for organization, and these paintings are
extremely fluent. personal memory and hand-craft. The latest work prayer 'scarves', and probably associated with
There is a generally complete structuring of the shows this use of mechanical mass-production Greek ritual 'fillets'. Pictorially they work usually
picture surface, as though the pattern flows in- processes, the facsimile object mated with the from back to front, the ground or field is set up with
finitely from the edge, as in some Mondriaans, but principle of contradiction. Take a look at the world the requisite 'atmosphere' to activate the various sets
in Setch's organization there is a Van Doesburg- of reason and unreason—is it real or unreal? of ribbons set in progressive planes. When positive
like 'jazz' angled and importune. This diagonally- Wood's most recent paintings have obviously to and dominant the space is almost totally recessive.
orientated structure actually stresses the dissonance do with land and seascape but precisely where and The first of this series was Ribbons for Jenny painted
between the edge of the painting and the environ- how is another matter; they certainly have nothing in the Spring of 1967 after a period of more formal
ment, with pattern struggling to overlap into life. to do with specific places as did many of his earlier surface construction, using planes overlapped by
Similarly, there is an acquired visual `oscillation' paintings. rigid linear scaffolding. The linear element
between the superimposed elements, yet at the Most of them act as a vista, you stand in front and developed into the looser ribbon-like forms, still
same time he is creating a systematized look akin watch the worlds go by. Sometimes they are relatively constricted, but now they flow freely but
to a mass-produced pattern. This is not a self- imaginary and mystical, at other times they are always particularized in form; the colour corres-
conscious concern with optical effects, it is more a more astronautic than ethereal. Depending on your ponds or relates to notions of thickness and weight,
method of psychological implication. He responds point of view (psychological) they are allusive some lift and float, stirring slightly or hanging
to the hand-painted appearance of surface patterns rather than illusive. A coloured field with dappled heavily. This implication of force is energetic but
of some Formica designs produced by mechanical waves and particles is as liable to be interrupted by so far never destructive—diagonal ripples, horizon-
process—he is concerned with the contradiction. the headlands of the senses as by sea-borne tal gusts, and, some might swear, a sweet-scented
Setch is, in fact, compulsively addicted to con- promontories of paint. zephyr.
tradiction, he observes it and utilizes it as a formal These pictures do have a varied range of atmos- The logical development from landscape associa-
principle. It's as if he weighed things in the balance pheres—physical atmosphere, veiled and vaguely tion to promontories finds natural completion in
and had to press down on both sides before any oriental, physical surface atmosphere—adeptly islands. The eight-panelled Islands (78 x 144 in.)
demonstration of equilibrium was allowed to take constructed—but most important and useful— uses the widest range of forms, and they operate in
place. chromatic atmosphere. In many of them the (forgive me) an almost oriental perspective space.
His other permutative interest is in process. In surface, or space, is then populated or activated by However, you don't have to conjure the islands out
Brick on brick (1968) he superimposes three different ribbons, again with carefully regulated or ordained of the mist; they slide and float across the vision-
types of representation: first the basic system of character. They come in a considerably varied colour aura instead of space-mist dissimulating
building using a basic-unit rectangle, then hand- range, from fretful flutterings to animated bursts, these delectable islands of the mind. Islands and
drawn 'dry-stone walling', finally the mechanically- but nothing that could be construed as jingoistic zephyrs, however, looks more Western and bracing
processed facsimile of brick (vacuum-formed flag-wagging. Generally the mood is lyrical, deli- perhaps, for those who prefer a rugged crossing
plastic). The process of construction is now in- cate and zephyr-like, again that oriental connec- instead of the more generally meditative context.
divisible from the subject, without recourse to tion, with attenuated Chinese streamers, Tibetan Tom Hudson