Page 34 - Studio International - September 1972

(Right)
Richard Lindner
The Couple 1971
Oil on canvas, 72 x 78 in
Fischer Fine Art Ltd
(Below)
John Mitchell
Untitled IV 1971
Mixed media on canvas, 9 ft 6 in x 9 ft 6 in
Camden Arts Centre
palpitating thing). In a work such as are sinewy and muscular, at their least successful
Complicated Green and Violet it is difficult to
unravel the relationship between the blue starting off amongst the bric-à-brac of French
tentacle-like shapes in the lower left, and the
regular march of reds, greens, violet and orange
across the upper part of the canvas. It is all
there—one can see the idea—but somehow it shapes became more elusive, the contours
doesn't work. blurred, the planes shifted, and a kind of
William Scott belongs to a slightly older luminous softness emerged. At the same time
generation than Heron, and it is interesting to
contrast the range of work which was on view maintained the sparseness of his earlier style
at the TATE retrospective with the Whitechapel
exhibition. In very simple terms Scott's career
has hovered between the poles of the figurative
and the abstract, but the two have always been
stylistically interdependent, so that even at colours have become less astringent, and the
their most luscious his paintings at their best
If Scott's visual stamina stems from a sense
of remembered reality, Ed Moses, who had his
first English exhibition with FELICITY SAMUEL,
relies for his structural framework on the
manipulation of a series of horizontal or
diagonal grids, which seemed stained rather
than painted, so evanescent is their colouring,
so imperceptibly do they merge into each
other. More determinedly than Heron or Scott
he treats his paintings as objects in themselves,
rather than as surfaces on which to express
ideas. Each is enclosed in a kind of resin
envelope which overlaps the edges of the
painting, the surface of which is broken by
what seem like exploded bubbles, thus
presenting an ever changing series of contrasts
of light and texture. Their pale tonal beauty,
their complexity hover, occasionally on the
verge of the sentimental, but hardly ever spill
over into it.
Not even the remotest suggestion of such a
quality can be detected in the immensely
thoughtful, almost didactic paintings which
John Mitchell showed at the CAMDEN ARTS
CENTRE in July and August. Passionately
concerned with demythologizing the accepted
visual conventions of art—brush strokes, the
picture-frame, montage—he restates them in a
new context, as though to explain to some
novice what they are all about. With their
rather acrid colour, and their size—ranging
around the ten-feet-square level—they are
concerned with problem-stating rather than
problem-solving, and any degree of 'softness'
they may have is irrelevant.
Like nearly all 'hard' art they have echoes
of the mechanistic, and I am always impressed
by the fact that though we are prepared to pay
lip service to the idea that technology is taking
command, we are seldom prepared to admit in
fact the extent to which our visual habits are
conditioned by their environment. All kinds of
unexpected references keep cropping up, from
the TV screen-shaped windows on modern
buildings, to the print-inspired emphasis on
black and white which keeps recurring in
painting. But more pervasive than this is the
extent to which machines have supplanted
classical and religious mythology as the main
source of our visual language. It is only the
most lyrical forms of abstraction which are
like the orgies of an aberrant Puritan. After reasonably free of this, and the most splendid
documentation of the process at work has been
Post-Impressionism, he created a dour world provided by the three annual exhibitions The
of pots, pans and domestic hardware, rather Non-Objective World (in actual fact the title
like some latter-day Chardin. But gradually the could be transposed into its antonym without
losing its relevance) which ANNELY JUDA has
been mounting, and which together have
covered the span between 1914 and the
he developed a series of figure paintings, which present. The latest was concerned with the
period between 1939 and 1955, and showed
but suggested also something of the sculptural with an amazing wealth of the familiar and the
qualities of Marino Marini. In his latest phase unexpected, the rich diversity of invention, the
the kitchen motifs are still echoing, but the controlled fantasy, and the vitality with which
canvases are arranged on a larger scale, the artists of all countries greeted and developed
the initiatives of Malevich and Mondrian. As
rhythms more heavily emphasized. international as late Gothic, as compelling in its