Page 52 - Studio International - April 1971

America, elsewhere I suppose) a free man is Through this year the character of the work could be improvisatory, and Walker does, in
hard to find. has changed, both in the shape and in the kinds fact, work most assiduously with that inner
Matisse, El Greco, Bonnard, Pollock, of spatial expansion. Walker's techniques for plane.
Walker communes with them all. Sometimes, in inducing tension are clarified in the later The last of the canvases to be completed
an access of gratitude and pleasure, he paints in horizontal paintings. The metal grid alone before his exhibition at the REESE PALLEY
the spirit of one or another. Not long ago he saw through which he pushes thick or thinned paint GALLERY in April is still less ambiguous on the
a Greco in Washington with men holding establishes a basis for contradiction. The surface, and still more mysterious as a whole.
writhing snakes, and he thought of Matisse's pattern is sometimes precise, as is its metal The twenty-foot expanse is primarily covered
late collages, and soon after, he painted a very mould, and that precision is juxtaposed with with a clear very serene putty-yellow surface,
tall vertical picture fraught with sinuous lumpy areas which seem to have no edges at all, broken rarely by whispers of relief. The two
movements of blacks, greens and greys, and a seem indeed to be thrust upon the surface as shapes are still there—the one on the extreme
deep blue shape resting midway to nowhere, and deliberate abrasives to the eye. But in the left bottom a dense red given a modelled shape
a mood as true to Greco as a mood can be. ensemble these areas of thick matter take their by blackish highlights, the one edging toward
The moods of his paintings are established places, as do the rare commas in a deliberately the right by contrast a dazzling white (painted
from the beginning, and not by colour alone. long sentence in modern writing, or the masses over yellow) with a charcoal grid flattening it
The rumblings of underpainting— those of unwritten notes in aleatory music. They are out. These different weights, the one ponderous
systems of grillework dots and lozenges—can be qualifiers and spacers. What they qualify in the and three-dimensional, the other light and
turbulent or benign, setting the tone for the more recent horizontal compositions is Walker's flat, are accented by the distinct shapes that
whole. Colour, texture, stroke, pentimento, and metaphor for vastly free extensions in all hover just above the imaginary horizon. The
finally, the peculiar disposition of one or two directions. These recent canvases often seem break in the line here is emphatic enough, but
shapes, work together to establish mood. composed with the specific end of describing an there are systems of dots in orange and gold
In the phenomenal sequence of very large intimation of boundlessness. The anchored relief that belie the linear reading. Once the eye
paintings produced in this one year in New shapes through which such illusion occurs starts moving over the surface, and once it has
York, the moods vary greatly. Take two earlier become much sharper, and often flatter than adjusted to the tension between the two forms,
examples : Touch carries over from earlier work before as they hug the bottom rim. They and once it has established that there is in fact no
the sketchy painted grid which falls in the middle announce themselves not only as repoussoirs, clear distinction between figure and ground, the
ground of a generally purple-blue setting. Trails but also as the firm repositories of all the experience of this huge canvas becomes
of vertical swatches of green establish a foreplane wayward energies surrounding them. Walker strangely exciting. Here, the assumptions of the
which is in turn pushed back by the two shapes even builds their surfaces with many layers, postwar informalists are challenged as are the
resting on the bottom of the painting. These are emphasizing their materiality and the firmness assumptions of the succeeding generations of
modelled in lighter green with whitish highlights with which they are attached to their resting rationalizers.
and stake out an isolated space. At the upper place. The heavy and light accents in colouration The informalists who worked with what
right there are stormy black and purple are pronounced. There is more clarity in the Anton Ehrenzweig called a gestalt-free image
accents, as though to recall to the eye that this is disposition of texture and shape, but were wary of anything that looked too sharply
a whole and very large space in which different paradoxically, more ambiguity in the definition modelled, or that seemed to suggest the third
kinds of events, poetic events occur. Very much of the kinds of spaces Walker is dealing with. dimension. Their dependence on the partially
the same thing happens in Pershore where That is to say, in a painting such as Double articulated, ambiguous form stemmed from their
Walker has retained the fragmentary grid, but Nac, Walker plays with the notion of figure conviction that 'finish' was closure, and freedom
the mood is utterly different. There is a spume and ground by placing a cluster of forms toward of the language of the unconscious demanded
of pale yellow-white rising from the heavily the bottom of his canvas which could suggest a openness, metamorphosis. Although many
modelled forms, contrasting vividly with their horizon. But there is a break in the sequence, a painters used both drawing and painting to
mass. And this movement rises into the areas subtle hiatus where the forms are slung into express quick insights, fleeting emotions, they
where greenish and orange drifts of impasto limbo. This break forces the horizon image away, were keen to avoid the sharp decision of an
spread along the middle plane, linking a series substituting a sense of continuity between the almost geometric form. Walker has taken back
of slipping spaces with the almost defined areas extreme foreplane, where the bold shapes sit the possibilities inherent in the modelled form
of shape and grid. The experiences here are of inviolable, and the upper spaces that extend without relinquishing the freedom to exploit his
slow, gentle movement, merging colours, without boundaries. Flurries of relief in the surface in a gestalt-free mode where he needs it.
gentle obtrusions into the forespace, and more upper yellow regions suggest hidden He has rejected the kind of attrition which found
tangible forms —more Bonnard than Greco, and continuities. Kandinsky said it is the inner plane successors to the informalists isolating a single
all Walker. that must be organized while the surface aspect (colour for instance, or wash technique)
for exploitation, infusing his work instead with
variety of experiences. Certainly his respect for
the masters, above all Matisse, has taught him
the importance of the detail in a grand-scale
painting. It is by fusing all the means deposited
in the history of painting that Walker has found
the issue from the impasse imposed precisely by
the history of painting. In rejecting the
shibboleths historicism has imposed on recent
painting, he establishes once again the infinite
possibilities inherent in the abstract act of
painting illusions on a two-dimensional
rectangle. q

4 John Walker
Touch 1970
Acrylic on canvas
108 x 240 in.