Page 50 - Studio International - April 1971

The shape's the thing: paintings by John Walker

Dore Ashton

Aragon, writing about the evolution of collage, dreams of Kandinsky who believed that forms vision that eliminates vanishing-point
recalled that Braque and Picasso used to talk could precisely mirror the inner state; and of perspective and deals with disparate levels in
about a 'certitude' —the pasted element around Miró; and of all those postwar painters who illimited spaces —are fundamental to his style.
which the painting reconstituted itself in a new posited their works with specific emotional Some attitudes from the previous generation
perspective. Such a certitude, with its powerful values. The use of strange shapes, moulded by a that inform his work : there can be no a priori
reminiscence of the solid things of this world, thousand intangible forces, and finally the scheme. Paint is potentially vital in almost any
appears in all of John Walker's new paintings in abstract product of inner necessity, characterizes form. Composition depends in each instance on
the shape of a shape. The shape, almost always a certain painting temperament which emerges the specific demands of the specific image.
an ambiguous derivation of wayward geometry again and again in history. Walker, in his free Process is the means to image. Passion is the
with its curving walls and occasional sharp facets decisions to avail himself of many means, carries origin of painting. Painting is a solitary, seven-
never quite resolving themselves into a nameable forward the tradition marked by its indifference day-a-week affair.
configuration, functions in Walker's painting to rules of any sort. As Schoenberg said, there is But if Walker extends the abstract
just as the pasted 'certitude' did in Picasso's and no new art—if it's art, it's new. expressionist tradition he is not in any way
Braque's collages. It sets the eye to wondering. What is new in Walker's art is precisely his enthralled by it. Rather, he feels free to use the
It provides the tension between atmospheric willingness to explore in depth the avenues of conventional means of a painter to establish new
flux and specific place, between endless expanse technique and feeling opened by the postwar habits for the eye. For instance, Walker uses
and bounded plot, between the time in which generation that has come to be called abstract underpainting as underpainting has always been
the imagination wanders unfettered, and the expressionist. He accepts certain assumptions used to enhance an illusion of activity beneath
time which is here and now. without question. If you work on an i8-foot-long the final image on the picture plane. It consists
By incorporating the solid mass of this canvas, for instance, there is bound to be a of a battery of textural and chromatic variations
ubiquitous shape in his new works, Walker certain implication of time. Walker accepts the carefully deployed to emphasize his certitudes.
indicates that the character of his impulse is in implication and sharpens the metric reading of He uses a metal grille which at times imposes a
the line of all those idealistic romantics who his canvases by measuring out the key shapes in honeycomb pattern beneath the skin of the
hoped their paintings could be analogues for carefully gauged intervals. Other abstract painting in relief, and at times is a sharp, heavily
spiritual and emotional states. He extends the expressionist assumptions—such as a spatial impastoed superimposition of rigid forms. The
dissonance he often achieves is troubling, even
unnerving to the eye which travels a gentle
luminous surface only to be stopped by powerful
eruptions. Traditional underpainting— those
glimpses of the painter's previous decisions—is
also there, playing against the unorthodoxy of the
grillework. Tremolos of relief in monochrome
reveal themselves as the viewer moves to one
side, hanging what might have appeared an
expansive field into a complex of levels in the
peculiar Walker spaces. Walker breaks the
habits of the eye in the way he uses the
traditional means. There is no new art, only art.
The shape: The shape sits firmly in Walker's
spaces. The spaces are always unique contexts