Page 51 - Studio International - March 1969

COLIN CINA'S RECENT PAINTINGS AT object the more it will tend to appropriate the
ARNOLFINI, BRISTOL, MARCH 19 TO APRIL 17 wall itself as a ground. In this context, the
second group of his recent paintings is of
special interest.
These employ, not perspective, but axono-
Colin Cina's recent paintings, exhibited at the metric projection: in which receding lines do
ARNOLFINI GALLERY in Bristol, are to some not converge, but remain parallel to one
degree meditations on the odd process of another at an angle of 45° to the base line.
cultural conditioning by which we perceive Axonometric projection is much used in tech-
space through the artifacts we make. They nical drafting. All the intervals can be
are representational, not abstract (the shaping measured to scale, on the page—which is not
of the canvas is meant only to increase its the case with perspective. It is a type of
illusionism) ; but it is a detached, frozen kind rendering which gives the most precise infor-
of representation, and it dwells on one image mation about a given object, and some idea
as its model. This is an empty, rectangular of its solid appearance, whilst sacrificing its
swimming-pool, sometimes of normal propor- `look' : it deals with actual size, as against the
tions and sometimes exaggeratedly stretched apparent size-distance relationships shown by
until it resembles a narrow concrete trough. 4 a perspective drawing.
Pool seven 1967 (top) and Neves loop 1967/8 (bottom),
(As a matter of record, Cina began to develop Cina's two most interesting axonometric
both acrylic on canvas, 42 x 84in.
his pool-image when, during a visit to the paintings, Pool seven, 1967, and Neves loop,
U.S. on a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation bur- 1967-8, complicate this situation in an active
sary in 1966, he was in a hotel room in New surrealist's sense, imagery. Illusion, in Cina's and highly inventive way. (Neves loop' is,
York. The view from the window consisted paintings, does not serve to persuade you of of course, 'Pool seven' spelt backwards; the
of an empty swimming-pool, some strips of sky the reality of the object (as it does in Ron paintings are intended to be hung together,
and concrete, and nothing else.) Davis' work, where the compelling quality of and one is a negative tonal reversal of the
In some paintings, such as Final deep, 1967 the illusion, forcing you to read the configura- other, dark form swapped for light.) It takes
(all the titles of the pool pictures are permuta- tion as if it were a real object, is the pivot of one a little time to realize that the dark blue
tions of the cliché, 'still waters run deep') the his pictorial method). Instead, it puts the band which defines the edge of the pool in
pool is seen in one-point perspective in a object in parenthesis, or quotation marks; Neves loop is, in fact, generating an 'impossible
closed space, with walls, ceiling and, at the perspective marks it off so that you can figure' —one which could not be reconstructed
far end, an open grille of vertical fins, which examine its linearity. Odd as it may seem, as a closed geometric form in three dimensions.
might be an entrance or an airconditioning this is also a surrealist legacy. The stilted, At a certain point—the top left-hand corner of
duct. In Still running deep, 1967, the side artificial, one-point perspective Cina employs the pool—the configuration loses its illusion-
walls are suppressed and the canvas is shaped isolates his shapes with the naif precision of, istic power and becomes flat paint on a
to the perspective profile of the receding pool, say, the forms in a piazza by de Chirico— surface. (This corner was the subject of intense
the end wall and the ceiling. Running orange, though, unlike the Turin arcades, they are visual testing on Cina's part, and its resolution
1968, presents a double image of the pool and not drenched in nostalgia and have virtually is the key to each of the paintings.) So one is
the grille without any further attempt at no evocative power at all. Cina's arbitrary left with a system of contradicted illusionism;
showing an architectural setting: they float perspective is not a mode of giving information which, in turn, makes it easier to switch one's
as figures on a `spaceless' orange ground, but about a particular object; it is rather an reading of the canvas profile—an irregular
they are located in relation to one another by instrument of compromise between the illu- ten-sided polygon—between illusion and ob-
a common vanishing-point. And that is all: sion of depth and the need for a coherent ject. In this way, Cina has injected a fresh
Cina's images are about as close to being silhouette for the shaped canvas itself. complexity into one of the besetting formal
totally deadpan as any figurative image, The very question of why canvases may be arguments of English art. Instead of the
short of an architectural blueprint, can be. shaped has tended, in the last few years, to smooth slide into distance of his perspective
Only the faintest suggestion of unease, antici- become encrusted with academic theory. This images, Cina's axonometric paintings intro-
pating of an event which has not happened generally takes the form of an insistence that a duce a complicated system of stepped planes,
yet, remains in these immaculate and air- shaped canvas must be object and nothing in which the realism of the image can be
less canvases. Something—but what ? —may else, without any illusionistic function, and tuned up or down by means of colour alone.
emerge from the flat, thick surface of the with no figure-ground relationship : the models Unfortunately, Cina's colour has not expanded
water, or float round the edge of that open of this situation being such paintings as enough to meet all the possibilities here. It is
grille in the background. This awkward Stella's Die Fahne Hoch. The 'objecthood' of cool, a bit can diedand very cautious—a
flicker of surrealist intrusion remains from the canvas, thanks largely to the massive matter of tentative, mannered transitions
Cina's earlier and less satisfactory paintings, dominance of Stella and his critics on the from pale grey to blue to buff and back again.
in which geometrical 'situations' were in- international scene, has by now become such Sometimes it is hardly more than tasteful
vaded by tiny biomorphic bugs, hatched by an article of faith that it obscures other issues, tinting. But any show by a 25-year-old
Wassily Kandinsky; the cages, grilles and such as the need to re-complicate the picture painter can, and should, be regarded as
tunnels in Cina's pictures exhibited at White- surface once the initial statement of its pro- transitional, and there is enough bite and
chapel in the 1966 'New Generation' show grammatic purity has become a general intelligence in Cina's present work to present
referred, deliberately, to hatcheries and reflex. It is to this question that Richard him as one of the most articulate English
vivariums. Such a reference only exists by Smith's shaped canvases are instinctively painters of his generation.
implication in the swimming-pool images of addressed; and the same is true of Cina's. ROBERT HUGHES
1966-7, and in the two most recent works in Shaping can be a mode of illusion; and Cina
this show—Still deep red, 1968, and Still deep takes the view that it is never, in practice,
green, 1969—they vanish altogether, leaving possible to eliminate figure-ground relation-
the canvas intact as a colour field, cleared of ships from one's experience of a picture, since
any implications about events or, in the the more hermetic the canvas becomes as an