Page 36 - Studio International - November 1972
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Vordemberge-Gildewart formulated his In the late work stronger pictorial order is WALTER DARBY BANNARD AT KASMIN GALLERY,
language of form elements more and more added to the graceful compositions. LONDON, 13 SEPTEMBER TO 7 OCTOBER
precisely and refined the colours from primary Horizontal-vertical structures multiply
three-tonal down to the subtlest tone, attaining a themselves. The colour, too, becomes deeper
mastery in colour elements which made him the and stronger. Vordemberge-Gildewart
authentic colourist among the constructivists. described it 'as dark organ tones mixed with the
When he abandoned the use of lighthearted sound of chamber music'. Because Darby Bannard writes as well as paints,
three-dimensional elements in the later work Vordemberge-Gildewart saw his work almost anyone interested in good paintings - and good
(half-moons, etc.) he did not forgo the space as a scientific experiment - objective, clear, writing - gets to be well briefed on the
dimension. At first lines or triangles appear uncompromising - in which chance played no mechanics of painting that Bannard is involved
above the frame like darts. The picture is not part. Nothing was created out of a momentary with. And like most painters who write, the
regarded as an isolated phenomenon but as an impulse, nothing out of personal emotion. Yet subjects he chooses tend to parallel the
art conglomeration of a wide circle of happenings even so the work is a pure mirror of the obsessions of his own art, as they change from
and conditions. The picture becomes a key personality of a man who sets order against the time to time. Hence, his marvellously lucid
which opens vistas and insights. . . . It can also chaos, sustained by the belief that elementary discussion of Hofmann's Rectangles back in 1969
mean the opposite, as when the picture, as form and colour constellations are not only when his own painting organized its loose
though looking for protection, retracts from the aesthetic games but can be exemplary models. painterliness around fairly specific rectilinear
periphery into the centre. WILLY ROTZLER shapes; and hence his fine article on Still last
year when these shapes began to disappear and
surface itself gained new prominence.
Surface has been receiving special attention
by a whole range of ambitious painters of late.
Jules Olitski was the first (in the mid sixties) to
reassess the sufficiency of transparent colour
stained into a canvas, and to find new ways of
getting paint back onto the surface of the canvas
itself. His recent work in scraped spread colour
continues on the path that spraying began.
Poons, Bush, Noland, Dzubas and some others
have, in their different ways, all been
contributing to this new painterliness; but
Olitski, I believe, is its most significant - as well
as seminal - practitioner.' Writing about
Olitski in 197o, Bannard pointed out that
since pale close-value painting can easily close
up and turn into a big flat object (that is,
appear too much an arbitrarily concluded
section of pure phenomena), Olitski is obliged
to pay special attention to the edges. The very
quality of surface in Olitski's work prevents
any interference with the interior by edge
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart Composition no. 6o 1931 Oil on canvas 181 1/8 in. x 23 3/8 in., 46 x 6o cm repetition to get the painting stabilized, and
there is nothing there that calls for it, so
Olitski brings in the edges by drawing, to
separate the paintings as paintings from the
physical object they comprise.
The new vertical paintings that Bannard is
showing at Kasmin have something analagous.
They learn - and learn well - from Olitski's
example (although the very fact of their
verticality, and edge-aligned strips, also recalls
Noland's recent formats). The edge-aligned
drawing they contain is not very far inside the
paintings, and cannot go very far inside, for
the same reason as in Olitski's work; but it is
far enough inside for it to work very differently
to Olitski's drawing. It hints at internal shape -
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