Page 32 - Studio International - May June 1975

ALAN

BARKER

Jennifer OiIle

Allen Barker's paintings look like a central plane by a finer red while a
lot of others so I tried to put him in diagonal of green moves the surface
context and couldn't. Perhaps he is back and down. He uses diagonals a
most like Elsworth Kelly, the minimal lot — as recession or apex.
look, the use of chance, the shaped This is what he's doing now but it
canvas, the stripes, the cut and all started in 1968 with what one could
constriction, the sense of interior call a mother form — a burgeoning,
form under confinement of edge. But sensuous figure fighting the rectangular
their lines and enclosures and edge, vanquishing it, emerging as the
tangencies stem from different shaped canvas. The fine bow like line
sources : Kelly's from the visible which had divided the mother figure
natural world, Barker's from the increased in power until its strength
invisible mental. His colour stripes almost equalled that of the curved
resemble Riley's but she is concerned edge.
with optical illusion, he with spatial. In 1971 the mother shape three-
He appears hard edge but hard edge dimensionalized itself into the 'poles'.
figures are of the ground, sharing it and The bow-like line became a vertical
its activity, while his figures are intended division hanging in space, the burgeoning
to do things to the ground. Hard edge figure became space itself. Light
colour is decorative, primary, and his flattened the four edged structure into a
can be but it is chosen so he can make plane, related to the paintings, but there
it undecorative too. He sometimes there is no perimeter, it is an ever moving
shapes his canvases but not the way circumference, with no beginning, no
Stella does, concerned with edge, but end. The edge vanquished once again.
rather in a convex/concave way. His Then came a broken pole, two verticals
bands support an intense, saturated joined by a square dowl, two different
colour like Noland's but Noland's stains angles on the same plane, a straight
are totally identified with surface while zig-zag, a falling, broken thing. And
Barker's negate surface, doing three most recently he attached a pole to the
dimensional things to it and unlike ceiling of his flat, a knife in space, solid,
both Stella and Noland he is not but permitting a spare half inch of air
interested in making graphical divisions beneath. In all these two dimensional/
and laying colour in. So you ask him three dimensional boundless/bounded
about influences and he mentions structures, diagonals create more illusory
Léger's late tapestries which he saw in edges.
Vienna in 1968 and Paolozzi's type of The vertical divisions in a 1973 canvas
colour in the pipe forms. And I realized became the four poles suspended in
the only point of reference was Barker's front of a 24 x 10 x 7 ft painting — the
own history and context. background of the 1973 work — Project z,
This Australian is not a colour 1974. The poles are chromatically related
painter. He is interested neither in to the divisions in the structure behind
colour juxtaposition, visual interaction them, the three-dimensional environment
or inter-reaction nor in the aesthetics can flatten out into a two-dimensional
of colour, in red as red. Any colour or whole, unless the environment is
chroma will do. Instead he structures movemented by air or people. Then
colour, making it work, or rather go everything opens up, flattens out. A
to work, as a vehicle for spatial complete analogy with his original two-
manipulation and form. He will make dimensional statement.
a heavy yellow drop the canvas or There is a recent series of drawings
shove it back or perhaps he will reverse stemming from the chromatically
the process and make the yellow light reduced paintings of 1973. Barker felt
and bring the canvas out. And he will the need to pick up a point and make a
take a nauseating, decorative pink and division and insertion on a surface,
make it transcend its inherent physical like a pole in space, using the red, the
weakness. He controls a surface lines of tension from the canvases. It
physically, chromatically, shaping it has a structural, chromatic quality.
out, pulling it in — flat canvases that Closely allied it produces a red red,
allude to shape; shaped canvases that separated by a paler tone, but not a pink.
are affirmed or denied chromatically. He found that within the linear
For example take two paintings one development he was introducing a
flat, one shaped, both reading inwards crossover, a disposition of movement,
as recession, apex, plane. In the former a reference to the broken poles. In
the colour at the edge rises and slips over others it was an S curve, a relation to
the apex of the curve picking up the the shaped canvases. In both he was
light, a physical and chromatic peak, physically controlling the surface with
subsequently led into the plane by a colour and chroma and playing the
darker line. The peripheral linear convex/concave game, and he realized he
divisions of the flat work relate to the was subconsciously throwing up an
concrete forms of the shaped canvas, a earlier work in a different image,
red line emerging, then drawn into the renewing his tradition. •

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