Page 30 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

Robert Medley's

new paintings

Bryan Robertson

Robert Medley's distinction as an artist who has conceptual art. An energy, at best an élan,
mostly lived and worked in England since which always reinforces the best of Medley's
childhood (he is now sixty-five) does not reside work has been retained.
in mere seniority. With Moore and Nicholson, What he has jettisoned are the final vestiges of
Sutherland, Bacon and Burra, he is one of the realistic figuration, already reduced to abstract
most gifted and independent artists of an older echoes and attenuated metaphors in paintings
generation; but in maintaining an attitude of executed from c.1960 onwards in the 1963
total intransigence, and in indifference, to the exhibition (much earlier work could be termed
demands of a conventionally professional abstract : I speak here only of an extreme degree
career, Medley's work remains largely unknown of abstraction), and any signs of a conventionally
to the general public. This loss-for I would `painterly' manipulation of a varied impasto,
regard it as a serious deprivation to be unfamiliar however thin or sparse-as it frequently was in
with the key works of Medley's fastidious and earlier canvasses. Instead, the surfaces of the
hard-won evolution-was in large measure new paintings present an immaculately clear
redeemed by his retrospective exhibition at countenance: paint is applied evenly, without
Whitechapel in November-December 1963. But stress, inflexion or incident of any kind. But I
many readers may have missed that occasion; would not call this handling 'impersonal' : it is
and as two successive waves of young artists indeed highly personal, possessed of a relaxed,
will almost certainly not have seen the exhibition unlaboured, thin silkiness that never lapses into
whilst Medley, not troubling to exhibit a mechanical covering of the canvas with colour. parallelograms. They are, rather, deployed in
publically since 1963, has now elected with Medley's instincts as a painter are irrepressible, such a manner, and with such an insistence on
innate sense of style to show his recent paintings however controlled, orderly and schematic they their separate individuality-for nothing quite
at the Lisson Gallery (normally the province of may have become. (In being 'schematic', repeats itself, variations in scale and deflections
far younger artists attempting to formulate a new Medley is still quite opposed to a systematic art.) of shape abound-that each painting is left,
language) a brief note on this new work may be The colour in Medley's new work is as finally, in a state of open tension. The paintings
useful here. aromatic, pungent, muted, sweet-sharp, milky, are as much 'resolved' as L'Escargot of Matisse
It should first be said that in not troubling to chalky, suddenly singing out clear and sharp, (on which papier decoupe Medley has delivered
exhibit since 1963 Medley has not marked time exotic and moody as ever : if I called it a searching and learned treatise, some years
or simply retired from the scene. What has `atmospheric' the word would be misinterpreted perhaps before it was fashionable to do so) but
happened to Medley since his retrospective in for Medley has no concern for the present with they are not sealed off or contained by a
1963 has been a prolonged encounter with the atmospheric space, intent as he is on the hermetic, static conclusion. And they are not
dissatisfactions and the urge to strip away that absolute flatness, not even shallowness of the irresolute so much as resolutely open : vulnerable
comes, as a great challenge, at almost any stage picture plane. But Medley has not lived the life almost, like the human condition or the human
in an artist's working life from early middle age he has lived for nothing: like Matisse (I am not anatomy or sections of that anatomy-notably
onward. It is never easy for anyone; it can stay making comparisons, only searching for an the torso-that have consistently occupied
fixed at an impasse; but Medley has an analogy), if Medley squeezed colour onto the Medley. These hints, allusions more accurately,
exceptionally cultivated intellect with which to canvas straight from the tube it would somehow, so far as formal mainsprings are concerned,
clarify and re-formulate his visual perception en route, acquire the lived-in', 'inhabited', should be sufficient for anyone who wants to
and, most particularly, his sensual apprehensions. experienced quality that only a true artist can know the vestiges of the raison d'être behind the
The result is a solution which may surprise achieve. Rawness or crudity would new work.
Medley's admirers but remains far less radical in miraculously disappear : The blue, the green, the It is not quite true to say that 'Medley has
its rejection of the past than first impressions may red, or even the black confronting you is an mostly lived and worked in England since
lead them to suppose. What Medley has done is imaginative, remembered, blue, green, red or childhood'. His stoic, sceptical, continually
ruthless, all the same, and needed his habitual black, and not a blank, manufactured colour. questioning, classically educated and oriented
courage to bring into the light; but the new If the paint and colour in his recent paintings intellect must be taken on trust; but Medley is
paintings are in fact a perfectly logical extension are refinements of earlier tactile and harmonic also a widely-travelled man, quite apart from
of his earlier work from a formal point of view : traits, we are left finally with shape and with his other cultivations, and entirely unparochial
They remain fully pictorial in the traditional formal organization. A better word here would in his knowledge, his insights and his allegiances
sense, with all the displacements and be 'deployment' : structural organization is as a painter.
irregularities that imply an informal situation strongly self-evident in the new paintings, rather Medley's background was sympathetic to
rather than a severely formal, depersonalized more obviously than in the mature and art. Painting was not unknown in the family : a
event. In short these paintings are highly increasingly subtle work which preceded it. forebear was a portrait painter and a
personal in their eccentricity and exist But Medley does not rely upon symmetrical contemporary of Opie, and Augustine Birrel
without the absolute objectivity, so design for the organization and resolution of was an uncle. The artist remembers visiting
impervious to impulse, that typifies a wholly his flat planes, his rectangles, squares and Matthew Smith in 1915, by pony cart, in the