Page 85 - Studio International - January February 1975

Gneiss Rock, Glenfilas. The element which intercepts the eye's into, another. The visual effect is technically astounding large-scale
peripatetic artist in search of a recession in such a way as to of an open layer of colour drawings (as much as 5 feet by 4)
virgin response to the natural dominate the scene, by virtue of revealing another layer beneath are what Socialist Realism ought
world, belongs to a similar its position and the distortion of and even another beneath that, to be. Portraits of workers and
tradition, the product of a its scale in relation to that of the while adjustments in the colour work-situations, they carry their
peculiarly Northern sensibility, natural topographical features. and dextrous execution keep the ideological conviction by virtue
which emphasizes the immanence The deference to nature is more activity close to the picture of a totally convincing aesthetic,
of the artist in nature. imagined than real, for it is the surface. The Double Trac which is exactly what usually fails
The images of barren artist first and foremost whom we paintings are less elusive and less to happen. A fine network of
Icelandic terrain seem to be a are required to contemplate. allusive than the Egypt-Trac continuous, evenly stressed line is
conscious contrivance of the Frances Carey paintings, and perhaps because of built up through three grades of
sublime, evoking the tabula rasa this they are less intriguing, lead-pencil to a largeness and
of a primeval world void of human ED MOSES however ingenious their clarity of form and a breadth of
life. The stones of Iceland and At the Felicity Samuel Gallery distribution of colour and
Clare immediately pose the London whatever the virtues of their self-
enigma of prehistoric November containment.
monuments, where it is frequently The material of Ed Moses's new Formalist criticism has made
difficult to distinguish between paintings at the Felicity Samuel it fashionable to assume that art
human and natural agencies; like Gallery was an idiosyncratic which tries to suggest nothing
Wordsworth's Wanderer: 'Among composite of tissue, nylon and outside itself is innately superior.
these Rocks and Stones, Rohplex which is delicately and As human beings have an
methinks, I see/More than the seductively tactile. Moses home- apparently unquenchable
heedless impress that belongs/ brewed it as a substitute for the instinct to tabulate their
To Nature's casual work: they resin on canvas of his previous perceptions by metaphors, this is
bear/A semblance strange of works, such as those shown in his a tendentious assumption. It has
power intelligent,/And of design first London one-man show at the been responsible amongst other
not wholly worn away.' Similar same gallery two years ago, after things for the convention that New
associations with the remote past finding the resin process too York of recent years has per se Esko Tirronen
Object No. 15,1973,59 x 59 in.
are inspired by the lines Long has threateningly toxic. The new been better, because more
pursued in Canada, Peru and material shares with the resin the stringently autonomous, than tonal control which are
England, among other places. quality of seeming tenuous while West Coast painting. This exhilarating for the eye to arrive
Once again the dilemma of being substantial. Otherwise it is generalization, a sort of racial at precisely because the means of
natural or artificial topography is opaque and impervious whereas prejudice, if nothing else has achieving them are so open and
raised; are they geodetic lines resin is translucent and ingestive, conditioned how West Coast (apart from the expertise
formed by wave action beneath and the greater formalization of painting has been looked at. involved) so simple. I find the
the earth's surface, which Moses's new work can be seen as Moses's cultivation of seductive visual experience not
possibly dictated the location of arising from this difference. In the material and subtle effects can be incomparable to that of arriving
primitive tracks and features such resin works the pigment is considered typical of a West at the serenity of a Seurat as the
as the Cerne Abbas Giant, the suspended within the material. In Coast sensibility, and none the product of endless dots of paint.
subject of a Long photograph in a the new paintings the character of worse for that. The idiom has all the careful
previous exhibition? Or do they the material precludes any such Elizabeth Claridge exactness of photo-realism with
represent the ley lines created by possibility. Instead the paint is none of its optical prurience — an
early man as a system of regulated across the surface of the WORKADAY FINLAND attitude which is carried right
communication, using tracking material and an elusive physical At the ICA, London through to the subject-matter,
stones to mark the stages along presence is replaced by a more 4 October - 3 November observed with wholly
the route, as Richard Long has concrete one. At the same time The title of this relatively unsentimental, let alone
done on occasions? the new works are more modest show (thirteen artists, ideologically loaded, admiration.
We are faced with the paradox assertively paintings than the sixty works in the two cut-off The result seems to me to achieve
of an artist who virtually denies previous ones. rooms upstairs on the posh side of that firm, large-minded optimism
himself a means of expression The six paintings at Felicity Nash House) was possibly which presumably is Socialist
through his extreme fidelity to Samuel's were from two main misleading, because it was an Realism's ideal. It is perhaps
predetermined phenomena, which, series titled generically Egypt- attempt at shorthand for worth adding that this idiom was
for all its novelty, simply imparts Trac and Double Trac. They something like 'recent aspects of very deliberately adopted: until a
a blandness to the surviving demonstrate Moses's continuing realism in Finnish art, with few years ago, Westerlund was
record. One of the most pressing predilection for discreet, hesitant particular reference to the artist's one of Finland's leading artists in
questions raised by this effects, for a complexity of quiet attitudes and responsibility to an abstract environmental and
exhibition is what precisely incidents. contemporary society in a country kinetic field.
constitutes the work of art; if the The Egypt-Trac paintings, A-I, orientated almost as much to the Two younger artists with
photographs serve a purely A-2 and A-3, are structured on a Eastern as to the Western bloc, comparable intentions, Harro
mnemonic function, then all that fine diagonal grid with the paint and still in the throes of converting Koskinen and Leo Jokinen, are
remains is a direct experience of tracking, as the titles suggest, from a rural to an urbaneconomy'. still technically too modest to
nature unique to the artist, from primarily in one direction. A thin Finnish art as a whole is as carry the message of realism
which the outsider is by mesh of colour is laid over a pluralistic in its modes as (which it does have). More
definition excluded. On the other ground that is either left free of anyone's, but its social- assured in an international-
hand, although Richard Long has paint, its desiccated texture commitment aspect, as it affects context way are painters like
declined to use landscape as a exposed, or painted out in a pale the lives and outlook of many Esko Tirronen, Ulla Rantanen
plane surface on which to colour. The Egypt of the title, if artists of whatever stylistic and Matti Kulmala, except that
manufacture tangible artifacts, his not descriptive, is at least persuasion, seems to have an realism seems to me emasculated
artful photographic series negates evocative and presumably experienced practicality about it when you take isolated
this non-interventionist principle. intended to be. Since titles both (fairly inescapable when you fragments and paint them with
He, of course, cannot approach trigger and regulate the live cheek-by-jowl with Russia?) such detachment (however
nature with an innocent eye and associations made to a work of which is almost different in kind, detailed) that their reality is bled
manipulates our perceptions as art, and the more abstract the let alone degree, from anything from them in the interests of
much as the eighteenth-century work the greater their influence, of the sort we may know here. slithery-smooth image-making.
artist who listed specific it is surprising that greater At least that's the strong More interesting is Kimmo
'stations' from which to obtain critical attention hasn't been paid impression one gets in Finland Kaivanto, who marries the slick
the appropriate picturesque to their role as part of a work. itself (though I speak from far too new-realist style to a faintly
effects. In a comparable fashion, Double Trac is a more literal brief acquaintance). Showing it Magritte-like surrealism, with
Richard Long edits our view of title and indicates how the abroad in an exhibition is another some felicitous images (a scarlet
the landscapes through which he paintings it refers to are to be matter. There it depends, as paper dart streaking past grasses
has passed; even the most received. The paintings A-I, B-2 always, on how good the artist is, like something supersonic on a
'artless' situation, a plain vista and B-2 are comparatively dense not on how interesting his death-mission). But the harbours
across the undisturbed in structure with heavier, more attitudes, and in this respect the and soulless cityscapes of Mikko
Canadian Prairie, predicates continuous tracks of paint ICA show could only demonstrate Jalavisto seem too ambiguously
some degree of intervention; travelling along both diagonals. various degrees of the poised between impersonal
where the artist has chosen to It is tempting to describe the unexceptionable, apart from one pattern and impersonal comment
make his mark, the spectator's structure as double woven but in brilliant talent to make the issue for me to make much of them,
attention is immediately fact one set of tracks more or less persuasive. while the obviously very personal
focused upon this 'artificial' overlays, as opposed to weaves Sven-Olof Westerlund's little scenes by Inari Krohn,
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