June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

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Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Arts

March 14 to June 7, 2015
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London, +44 20 7300 8000

The Royal Academy’s Richard Diebenkorn show operates on the basis that if he is known at all in Britain — and the publicity for and reviews of the show tended to assume that he isn’t — then it’s for his late Ocean Park series, named for the studio in which it was produced, as with all of his serial work. Accordingly, curator Sarah C. Bancroft sets out to challenge that narrow view by stressing the historical and geographic narrative. In three rooms, Diebenkorn’s work moves from an early abstract phase in room 1 (with paintings made in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, between 1950 and ‘56), to a surprising figurative turn in room 2 (Berkeley, 1956-66), to the Ocean Park paintings in room 3 (Santa Monica, 1967-88). The show has 20, 25 and 15 works from those three periods, respectively, including drawings from each, and five of the 145 large Ocean Park paintings.

Ahead of the Royal Academy’s efforts, then, Diebenkorn’s British reputation lay mainly with painters rather than the general public, so it made sense to take six well-established painters to the show and seek their opinions on it. They split pretty much 50-50, with Michael Stubbs, DJ Simpson and Katrina Blannin persuaded of the importance of at least the Santa Monica years, but Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger and Dolly Thompsett finding little to praise in Diebenkorn’s oeuvre.

There was some criticism of the show’s hanging. Simpson felt that the crowded early rooms left far too little space between paintings. Carr agreed, finding that the experience became “colorful, rather than about color” — as it wasn’t optically possible to isolate the color relationships within a given painting from those of its neighbouring paintings. The third room did give somewhat more space to the work, but the Sackler Rooms on the Royal Academy’s third floor have no natural light, and everyone felt that Ocean Park paintings would have benefited greatly from that.

Looking at the first room, Stubbs emphasised the historical context: the paintings were “typical of the early ‘50s in developing a Cubist space into more fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously construct and contradict the space.” Affinities were noted with English painters in the ’50s: Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, and Ivon Hitchens. Niederberger, too, felt that that Diebenkorn’s paintings are very much of their time, making them harder to access today in a way she saw as problematic. A venerable question arose: how did Diebenkorn know that a work was finished? Stubbs felt little judgement was in evidence, suggesting he appeared to, “throw everything at the picture until he decided to throw in the towel as well.”

Simpson was more persuaded by Diebenkorn’s instincts. Quoting one-liner summaries of the instinctual decisions involved, he thought the artist had judged “when there’s enough push and not enough pull,” or when he’d achieved “the right kind of wrongness.” Simpson liked the oddity in Diebenkorn’s colors, and how certain areas – for example, the purple in Urbana #6 — take on the status of objects within the pictorial field. He also liked the variation between dry-looking and comparatively lush application of paint.

Diebenkorn never prepared the ground with sketches. ”A premeditated scheme or system is out of the question,” he said. Rather, all the action can be seen in the paintings. That means they are heavily layered — though the layers are thin. The artists agreed that many early works could be read as aerial landscapes — or sometimes interiors — even though their primary qualities are abstract. They also agreed that Diebenkorn appeared to operate by addition only, with some scratching into the surface, but no scraping off of layers. Indeed, one of Diebenkorn’s own rules (from his list of ten “Notes to myself on beginning a painting”) was that “Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”

I rather liked a group of charcoal life drawings, which Diebenkorn started to produce in the mid-‘50s at Wednesday evening sessions with his friends David Park and Elmer Bischoff, and which marked the beginning of his move towards explicit representation. True, the debts to Matisse are undeniable, but they have a relaxed intimacy, and integrate the figures convincingly into their architectural settings in a way which links to the frequent presence of windows in the figurative paintings, and to the architectonic character of the abstractions to come. Yet the artists were unimpressed, seeing them as routine implementation of commonly taught approaches, including the treatment of backgrounds.

In fact, none of the painters rated the middle period highly, but their reasons varied. The painters whose own practice is most abstract tended to be the most sympathetic. Simpson and Stubbs thought that some of the paintings succeeded, but that they were too imitative of Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard. Thompsett felt the diaristic still lifes were less successful than similar painters, such as William Nicolson. The doubters complained that Diebenkorn failed to generate any psychological charge, and that, while there were abstract aspects present, they weren’t interesting in this period. Thompsett provided a partial exception: one mid-period painting, Seawall (1957), was the only one she really connected to in the whole survey. Here, Thompsett felt, “Diebenkorn had generated the language of sensation,” whereas elsewhere, she concluded, “he lacks a soul.” Seawall aside, she couldn’t grasp what he wanted to communicate, what drove him to make art.

Did Diebenkorn emerge as a strong colorist in the late work? Thompsett was unimpressed by their pastel tendencies, finding them “chalky” and too keen to be pretty. Seeing Diebenkorn’s “structure of horizontals and verticals with a relatively desaturated color palette,” Carr said she “couldn’t help wanting them to have the kind of rigorousness and sensitivity that Agnes Martin’s paintings do. She uses color in a very optically active way. His intention with color seems to be entirely descriptive of place or mood.“ Blannin, on the other hand, loved the way she could see that “saturated colors have been diluted by milky washes.” She emerged as the great enthusiast for the late work, admiring Diebenkorn’s ability to achieve his effects on the reduced scale of cigar box lids as well as in the seven-foot-high canvases — with which she said she’d be keen to live, perhaps the diagonal energies of Ocean Park #27 (1970) and the aqueous calm of #116 (1979) .

Diebenkorn denied any representational element, but the Ocean Park series does retain an aerial and window-like feel, which reads across from the earlier abstractions, consistent with their production in a studio overlooking the sea from a high vantage point. Continuity or not, Stubbs thought there was justice in the greater fame of the late work, in which he felt Diebenkorn was “more confident with the edges of forms and with variations between soft and hard edges.” If so, this may be what Diebenkorn got out of the move into and out of figuration: it gave him objects with which to establish his approach to color boundaries in a more natural way, which then carried over into his later abstract work.

I was reminded that Tom Wesselman explained his desire to paint figuratively against the background of Abstract Expressionism as a desire for “definite elements to manipulate in a very specific and literal framework.” That sentiment fits with Stubbs’s appreciation of the Ocean Park series: the geometry gave something for the gestural brushwork to play against,. In contrast, Carr found “his divisions, edges and pauses slack.” She liked Berkeley #57 (1955) for its “honesty and humility,” but was less attracted to the “confidence” Stubbs had identified in the later work. Niederberger was unenthusiastic about all phases, even though she said she’d been impressed by Diebenkorn when she was a student. Now she condemned the work as merely “nice to look at,” asserting that, while Diebenkorn operated well at the aesthetic level, he didn’t engage the brain. If Diebenkorn does engage the brain, I think it’s through the way he solves the formal problems that allow his work to appeal to the eye: we can follow him thinking his way through a composition, and see how he applies his Notes to myself, such as “attempt what is not certain” or “be careful only in a perverse way.”

That seemed to be at the core of Stubbs’s appreciation. He felt that the vehicle of the grid gave the later Diebenkorn “a way to contain his expressive gestures and the interesting and radical awkwardness of his colors successfully.” Blannin thought this “sophisticated,” even though you can see the signs of struggle. Simpson agreed, suggesting that Diebenkorn had found an approach which was quiet, not because he lacked energy or desire, but because he was “unegotistical.” “The coolness is not impersonal,” Simpson opined, “even though it avoids big, heavy, self-aggrandising gestures.” Stubbs agreed that Diebenkorn had desire, “even if it was very cool,” though he conceded that he was “more impressed than moved” by the results.

Maybe that absence of emotional impact relates to Diebenkorn’s contented and straightforward personal life, which provided him with none of the dark materials of such predecessors as Gorky, Rothko and Pollock. I liked a drawing from 1971, in which strategic pentimenti and the dialogue between ruled and freehand lines works well. Moreover, drawing directly onto the canvas with paint is fundamental to the Ocean Park series, and John Elderfield has suggested that Diebenkorn’s drawing is “what holds a structure together and keeps its firm.”

A gap emerged, then, between enthusiasts of the late work and those who thought it merely safe and tasteful, even if it embraced an artful messiness . Thompsett felt that Mondrian — an obvious influence behind the Ocean Park series — succeeded better because his approach was much tighter. Yet it was precisely the tension between tight and loose that appealed to the Ocean Park advocates. Moreover, as Blannin pointed out, Mondrian himself developed his frameworks instinctively, and up close his paintings are alive with brushwork that is far from neutral.

Do Diebenkorn’s paintings have “personality”? Perhaps of places rather than of people, was the view – even when he is depicting people, as they tend not to be individuated as characters. Indeed, one could argue that a small depiction of scissors is more of a portrait than the mid-period works featuring people, who seem present mainly for their abstract qualities. All the same, it was agreed, the personality of the painter comes through, even if it is through choice of color and structure, rather than gesture. The late work, I felt, is monumental yet intimate.

Overall, then, the mixed verdict showed at least that there’s enough variety and interest in Diebenkorn’s work to generate differing opinions. That itself suggests the work has virtues, even if they are hard to pin down given the somewhat subjective nature of the judgements involved — and all six artists said they’d enjoyed their visit, even if the substance beyond that enjoyment could be called into question.

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Analia Saban: Interiors at Sprüth Magers

February 27 to March 28, 2015
7A Grafton Street
London, +44 20 7408 1613

The tradition of paint on canvas can act as a provocation to contemporary artists, who may do without either the liquid (e.g. Binky Palermo’s cloth) or the ground (e.g. Lynda Benglis’s pours). The Los Angeles-based Argentinean Analia Saban doesn’t just challenge the conventional role of paint and canvas, she also undermines the “on” with her hybrid painting-sculptures. Her first London show, at Josh Lilley in 2010, featured Acrylic in Canvas with Ruptures (2010): paint was stored in bags of canvas, with some of it bleeding through laser-cut holes while most of it dried into sculptural substance. Saban explained then that she wasn’t looking to oppose painting but to enable the viewer to appreciate the elements in a different way by demonstrating how much information and structure they hold. ”It’s a dialogue,” she said, “not a fight.” Saban adopts fresh strategies for each project, but her questing yet playful way of thinking remains a connecting thread.

Saban’s latest solo sees her upsize — indeed, she shows across all three floors of the gallery’s quasi-domestic space — but without reducing the commendably perverse metaphysical wit with which she pushes her materials further than they can be expected to go. The townhouse location plays into the theme of “Interiors,” such that Saban gleefully ignores distinctions between not just painting, sculpture, and photography, but also furniture and design. This fertile show contains, by my count, nine different strategies for making a painting of sorts, none of them what a traditionalist would expect.

Claim (from Chesterfield sofa), from 2014, looks at first sight like a settee with a painting resting on top of it. A closer inspection reveals that the painting is joined to the chair, and that the chair is actually part of the painting: Saban had a custom-made couch covered in canvas, leaving enough fabric for the excess to be pulled clear over stretcher bars. This teases any collectors who might want a painting to match their furniture, as well as challenging any po-faced definition of the difference between art and design — and their relative values. And what’s the painting on? A chair?

Draped marble (Fior di Pesco Apuano) (2015) sees a substantial block of stone draped over a wooden sawhorse as if it were a towel or, in Saban’s skewed world, perhaps an abstract painting hung out to dry. (What’s it on? The line.) Here the refusal to accept conventions takes on the natural assumption that marble is inflexible, and slyly suggests through the historical resonance of its central material that the art of the past can also be interpreted more flexibly than we might assume.

The two Bulge paintings here, both from 2015, are a spin on — perhaps even a deconstruction of — Saban’s earlier acrylic-in-canvas works. The wall seems pregnant with a protruding bag of paint; but there is no canvas or other container. The skin results from using encaustic, which dries to a solid and glossy finish. That evocation of the body, by the way, can also be traced through Saban’s work. There is a palpable physicality to her processes, distancing her from drier conceptualist approaches.

Saban has also won an award as a photographer. That may seem a strange way to introduce a series in which she paints on canvas — but, of course, her 2014 Markings series doesn’t do that in a straightforward manner. Saban took photographs of variously colored paint cans stored on shelves, had them developed as large C-types and then poured boiling water on the surface so she could scrape away parts of the images. She then used those scraps of color to make an abstract collage attached to the photograph. These diptychs, then, make a photograph of paint, and then paint with the photograph. Paint, once more, is Saban’s subject and object, but not in any orthodox sense her medium.

Saban, then, is a humorous conceptual artist who plays around with the structures of representation. If that sounds like a description you could apply to John Baldessari, fair cop: Saban happily identifies herself as a former student and still assists him, though as she explains, ”There were no rules there — he is not at all dogmatic, and was always pushing me to do whatever I wanted.”

“Interiors” is most enjoyable, but is there also a serious point beyond the ingenious fun? I’m inclined to read Saban as opposing categorization: the sheer number of ways she finds to confuse the distinctions between mediums accumulates into an argument that the very idea of such classifications is unstable and inappropriate. And if that’s true in art, might it not read across into life? We should be far more reluctant than we are to pigeonhole people according to superficial characteristics. I emerged from Saban’s show thinking: we must be pluralist, multi-cultural and non-judgmental. Art may not change the world, but it’s nice to think that, if it could, it would be for the good.

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January 30 to March 14, 2015
63 Margaret Street (between Great Titchfield and Great Portland streets)
London, +44 20 7580 1480

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. She regularly exhibits her work while also co-directing a project space, a platform for invited artists to produce a site-specific work. Her current curatorial and ongoing offsite projects include: “Collateral Drawing,” “The Opinion Makers” and “A5, Athens.” She found time to take in ”The Presence of Absence” at the Berloni Gallery in London, a 14-artist exhibition curated by artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent, and to discuss the show with him.

BELLA EASTON: How did the show come about?

PAUL CAREY-KENT: As with the four previous shows I have curated recently, it stemmed from a gallery that I know fairly well asking if I’d like to put on a show. In this case, Berloni had two preferences: for a conceptually based group show and for a minimal proportion of painting, as they felt their existing and planned programmes were painting-heavy and they wanted a contrast.

What’s the idea behind of “The Presence of Absence”?

It’s often said that negative space is as important as positive shapes in a composition. The works in this show turn around a parallel feature of content, as opposed to form: namely, what is not present is at least as important as what is present — so a key role is played by the paradoxical-sounding “presence of absence” in work by 14 artists.

What were your influences leading to that idea?

Probably my background in philosophy: I like a good paradox, and have always been interested in how far you can push an approach in art — for example, how little can possibly be enough? My standard operation procedure as a curator is probably that I see a lot of shows — some 800 a year, of which I write on about 150, so I do have a wide spectrum of artists to choose from once I’ve fixed on a theme. My preference is not to have heavily intellectualised theory, but to look for something simple and thought-provoking that can connect choices together without pretending to exhaust them: there will always be more angles on the work of interesting artists, and so a show can develop its own complexity.

How did you decide what to put in the show?

Just before being asked to curated the show, I had seen a rough cut of Maria Marshall’s new video. She made a film in 2001 in which a boy kicks a ball against the wall of a church; only the ball has been digitally removed leaving only its sound and shadow. It is an attack on the church of sorts, albeit not too effective, with a subtext of how football might have become a new religion. Her new film (premiered in this exhibition) shows a ball bouncing around the dilapidated interior of a church in Georgia. This time it’s the person who has been edited out and the ball bounces menacingly around, looking likely to knock over iconic religious images set on a table — but never quite does. The idea of putting these two films together pushed me towards this particular project, out of the range I had in mind. I planned to mix film, sculpture and photography with a small amount of painting. I decided that a sound-only piece would be thematic; and Giorgio Sadotti proposed the scent installation, which I was happy to accept.

Who else is in the show?

Films by John Smith (The Black Tower, 1987) and Liane Lang (The Last Days, 2012-13) use buildings, outside and in, to animate our understanding of what we cannot see. Stefana McClure gives us the longest films — albeit, it could be said, without images or duration — through two of the drawings in which she traces their complete subtitles. A sound installation by Bronwen Buckeridge creates an illusory space in the midst of the gallery. Nika Neelova presents a sculpture that seems to stand in for another absent work, echoing Rachel Whiteread’s characteristic casting of the negative, seen in her Herringbone Floor (2001). Blue Curry’s found object groupings stand indirectly for people and for differing constructions of their self-images. Alan Magee fills in two hoops with plaster. Anni Leppälä and Jason Oddy exploit the uncanny ability of the photograph to freeze into permanence what is and isn’t there. Two painters complete the line-up: Martine Poppe’s images come and go as we circle round them, and Ian Bruce plays with the absence and presence of people in their surroundings.

What’s that smell?

That’s Sadotti’s Vatican (2015): he instructed that incense be burned at the gallery daily in order to evoke an absent place.

Is curating a creative medium or process for you and, if so, could it be suggested that the outcome of the curation is the presence of the absence of the curator?

I suppose it is creative, yes, though essentially I do it for enjoyment. It’s a nice thought that I was present during the show while absent; though I was present several times guiding people around.

Has there been an audience favorite?

It’s encouraging that one visitor or another has named each artist in the show as a particular favorite. That said, it’s probably fair to mention three artists as being especially popular. The remarkably persuasive spatial illusions created by the three minutes of binaural sound that make up Buckeridge’s Mid Eye Long High (2013) provoked such animated responses in the people listening that I was asked at the opening whether it was a performance piece! It also proved the biggest hit with child visitors. Artists tended to be struck by the simple elegance of Alan Magee’s Return to Glory (2014), in which filling two hula hoops with plaster makes quintessentially light toys into heavy sculptures, removing their function and presenting them as art. Of course there was nothing in the hoops originally, so I see this as an absence of absence itself. The two Maria Marshall films were also very popular.

If given the opportunity to expand on this theme as a larger exhibition, is there anything you would do differently and who else would you include?

I originally asked 18 artists, expecting that some would turn me down, and four did. Normally, one would not mention that, but here it seemed thematically apt to imagine them as present: John Stezaker, with a work from the Tabula Rasa series, wherein the removal of part of an image stands in for a screen and simultaneously implies the possibility of other presence. I’d wanted one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs, which curiously parallel Stefana McClure’s arrival at something like a modernist monochrome through the act of transcribing subtitles to the point of indecipherability. Paul Pfeiffer wasn’t included, but he’s an artist best known for editing out parts of video footage to great effect. Finally, I wanted Mungo Thomson’s The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963-1995, a sound piece comprised only of applause recorded at Dylan’s concerts. That proves oddly addictive, and would, I believe, have been a fitting presence for those who did accept my invitation. Still, I’d like those four to accept second time around, and it would be good to have a more substantial presence from some of the other artists.

Did everything turn out as you expected?

Perhaps not as I expected, but certainly as I hoped. A number of relationships occurred that I had not anticipated. For example: Neelova and Magee echoed not only each other, but also the windows of the gallery’s upper space; and the way in which works covered for each other’s absences was picked up by visitors and critics, such as Rowena Hawkins, who reviewed the show for The Upcoming.

Were there any unexpected or unplanned “presence of absence” surprises that came out of the curation?

What I had anticipated least was how several works would turn out to reference a critical question of presence or absence: does God exist? Wherever you stand on that, there’s no denying the charge that it brings to the work of Lang, Marshall and Sadotti, and there’s also implications of a world beyond in Leppälä and Magee, an angel in Poppe’s painting and a cross to be read into one of Oddy’s photographs of the Pentagon, which shows a rebuilt room 18 months after the crash of Flight 77 destroyed it on September 11, 2001.

What future UK or international curatorial projects do you have lined up?

Curation is very much my third string after my day job and art writing, but I have two definite plans for the rest of this year: a group show themed around “weight” at London’s Maddox Arts in April, and a ten-artist Anglo-German project in Berlin in September, which presents works of art alongside the collateral residue of their production (an interesting theme, but it’s my co-curators, you and Iavor Lubomirov, who came up with it!). I’m also booked well ahead to present a group show of process-based abstract painting at Soho’s St. Barnabas club in 2017. Then there are several possibilities that are more speculative at this stage, including an IKEA-themed show, and two potential co-curations with artist friends Jane Harris and Sara Haq.

Thank you Paul for your very personal and informed incite into a truly exciting exhibition. I look forward to your future curations and working with you on Collateral Drawing Berlin, later this year.

For more details see: www.berlonigallery.com
paulsartworld.blogspot.com
http://www.collateraldrawing.org

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English-born artist Rupert Goldsworthy has followed an eclectic path over the past two decades. Living mostly in Berlin or — as at present — New York, he’s spread his energies across writing, researching and curating, as well as his own art, and has run project spaces in both cities. There are clear continuities across all those activities, though: the history of political activism and AIDS; an interest in how different communities interrelate; and an ongoing investigation into how images are reused and what they stand for. His book, CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof (2010), for example, traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. His last exhibition at Ritter/Zamet, in 2012, used image sources as diverse as medicine packaging, stickers from street art, and his own photographs of signs and monuments to juxtapose the old and new communities in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

Everything in Goldsworthy’s current show was made onsite during a month’s residency at the gallery. The floor dominates: it was undisguisedly hand-painted with typically North African tile-like patterns. Combined with the natural light filtering through the small gallery’s roof, Mosque Floor generates the atmosphere of a courtyard and makes for an environment that — true to his interdisciplinary form — provides the platform for events with guest artists, musicians and writers.

The images around the courtyard are predictably varied. The most striking and conventionally painted is Clone Moustache, a looming close-up of part of a face with bushy hair completely covering the mouth. That suggests secrecy or a failure of communication, as well as membership of the 1970’s Castro-clone scene, a culture driven by extreme promiscuity. Both aspects fit the text paintings Mineshaft Dress Code and The Coleherne, which adopt a painterly photographic halftone dot format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s, to depict a crowd outside a notorious 1970s London leather club. The text is a word-for-word enamel reproduction of the club’s amateurishly hand-written dress code notice, which Goldsworthy has blown up to the scale of a man’s body. New York’s Mineshaft was among the first sex clubs to be closed by the city during the AIDS crisis, and according to Goldsworthy, its dress rules were well known in gay lore. The list is fascinating, featuring as it does both what can be worn (biker leathers, western gear, uniforms) and what can’t (suits, rugby shirts, disco drag and, surprisingly, cologne or perfume).

If those three paintings suggest nostalgia for the pre-AIDS freedoms of the ‘70s, albeit tinged by what came later, then Anita and Brian takes us back a little further: in a red and black graphic style that imitates a printing process, we see Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones in Nazi uniforms. That puts us in 1969, just before Jones was found dead in

his swimming pool. Finally, Bull appropriates an early 20th century cartoon about the plight of Armenians, then adds a painterly splatter of bloody color. Several copiously moustached men strive to push a bull off a cliff: impending disaster is now visibly present.

The overall effect is more allusive than systematic, but we might think not just about AIDS, but more generally about how one culture imitates or opposes another, or how visual representations help form cultural identities, or whether the various patterns of collapse referenced — not just the end of the pre-AIDS sex scenes, but the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey, the fall of the Third Reich, and the endpoint of Western colonialism suggested by the floor’s expansion of Islamic influence — have any commonalities.

All that makes for a fascinating and emotional installation. London is very different now, and as an ex-pat visiting his hometown this year after three decades abroad, Goldsworthy talks of finding a sad irony in the double erasure of its recent history: first the decimation of his generation by AIDS, and then gentrification. You do, though, need the background provided by Goldsworthy to pick that up, else all you get is disparate work with an aura of potential linkage. Other artists — de Chirico and Rauch, for example — make a virtue of frustrating our desire to make logical connections, but integrate their choices in a distinctive painterly language. Goldsworthy is a chameleon painter, choosing styles to match his sources. That may be thematically appropriate, but it does sacrifice that sense of the artist’s own visually coded world, which makes for more immediate appreciation.

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University of Derby
February 21 to March 28, 2014
Markeaton Street
Derby, DE22 3AW, +44 (0)1332 593216

Contemporary Applied Arts
April 10 to May 31, 2014
89 Southwark Street (between Great Suffolk and Lavington Streets)
London, LE1 0HZ, +44 20 7436 2344

Born in Derbyshire in 1938, Emmanuel Cooper was one of Britain’s foremost studio potters, whose expansive interests also led him to prominent roles as an art critic, broadcaster, author, political activist and teacher — most recently as visiting professor of ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art. Cooper moved to London in the early 1960s to study with Gwyn Hanssen, setting up his own Westbourne Grove workshop in 1965. The decision to remain within the concrete vistas and glittering lights of the metropolis, eschewing the rurality of traditional pottery, was in large part a response to his social and political needs as a gay man, which in turn informed his professional pursuits and his potting. In doing so Cooper set the tone for a life dedicated to individual and creative investigation, rather than convention.

“Emmanuel Cooper OBE, 1938-2012, A Retrospective Exhibition,” a traveling show recently at the Ruthin Craft Center in Wales and Contemporary Applied Arts, London,brings together examples from throughout his 50-year career, beginning in the 1960s during his time as a production potter, through his final years when he experimented freely with hand-built forms. At the heart of the exhibition are the porcelain and stoneware vessels for which Cooper is perhaps best known, and that convey architecturally his environmental interests and even the characteristics that defined him.

Superlative pieces include stoneware bowls from the 1990s and 2000s, in volcanic glazes of blue, turquoise and cerulean that look like ancient ceramic calderas. Handling them, if one is fortunate enough to do so, is an immense pleasure because it confirms the potency of their physicality and object-ness. They evoke both the astronomical and the quotidian — vast cosmological star fields, but also the pitted detail of coarseurban surfaces. A bowl from 2005 in white-blue plutonic glaze rises from a modest circular base, its sides opening out at a steep angle to a graceful, wide rim, lending a sense of volume that far outweighs the actual dimensions. These bowls inhabit space so confidently that, like celestial bodies, they seem to possess their own enigmatic atmospheres.

Other works, such as a lean, high-spouted jug of elliptical design, containing in its front edge all the nobility of a ship’s prow, are glazed in cascading rivulets of light grays or whites upon darker ground, sometimes tinted with eddies of reds, yellows or blues that appear fluid. They are reminiscent of those tantalizing geological remnants on distant planets that could indicate where water once flowed. Closer to home they echo one of Cooper’s consistent motives taken from city life: lights reflected in the tarmac of rain-soaked London streets. This was an experience of color in fluent motion encountered by him many times on his motorbike during nighttime rides home from a bar, an opening or a lecture. The nature and effects of water are a theme throughout Cooper’s oeuvre. A quiet yet pivotal aspect of these works is the subtly handled relationship between structure and texture, where the simplicity of elegant, balanced lines permits the eye to move unhindered across rugged, prismatic crusts.

Elsewhere, smoother porcelain bowls — stem and traditional — range from bold daffodil yellows to softer oranges, pale blues, and whites, often with flecks of varying color floating upon glassy surfaces. The rims are sometimes distinguished by a thin line, as can be seen on a stem bowl of delicate pink with gold-yellow perimeter (made in the 1990s), or a liquescent bowl of light blue, circled in red brim (from the 2000s). While the stem bowls in particular are redolent of organic forms and although their clay is from the earth, the intention of the work itself is not of the earth, but drawn from an urban existence.

Hand-built porcelain tea bowls from 2010, constructed with strips of clay, the joins visible beneath the glaze and the form less concerned with the wheel’s precision, evince a strong sense of investigative play, showing that Cooper’s industrious nature remained undiminished toward the end of his life.

During the early- to mid-2000s I lived with Emmanuel Cooper and his partner David Horbury, at their Chalcot Road home, behind the cluttered cornucopia of their Fonthill Pottery shop on the ground floor, which was rarely, if ever open, and operated more as display and storage space, which disappointed passersby. Emmanuel’s studio was in the basement, a sacrosanct part of the house that I became familiar with. We used Emmanuel’s pots and plates daily, washed them, stacked them, and once or twice accidentally broke them. Eating from them greatly enhanced the sense of occasion, whether a pedestrian meal or one of his famous Sunday night supper parties, while also raising a strange dichotomy — using works of art that were collected by museums, sold at auction and published in exhibition catalogs, in the functional, unfussy realm of our daily rituals. Drinking from the deep, translucent layers of a Cooper mug, the base lost under dark tea, I often thought that there were not storms contained within those cups, but entire galaxies.

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16 May – 28 June 2009
Leeds Art Gallery

18 July – 20 September
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

At a first glance, The Russian Linesman, a group exhibition curated by Mark Wallinger seems to be an eclectic choice of art and artefacts, like a contemporary cabinet of curiosities.  Such a comparison, however, obscures this exhibition’s genuine qualities.  The Russian Linesman, in fact, is exemplary of what happens when an artist intelligently uses curating as part of his or her artistic practice.  This exhibition is a work in itself in its use of appropriation, revealing extraordinary acumen in its choices and juxtapositions.  The show’s sub-title; Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds is the touchstone for the exhibition and Wallinger’s selection is a shifting focus between taxonomies of kind, meeting points between nations, religion and ideologies (that are inevitably sites of conflict and watersheds in history).

The film of Philippe Petit’s audacious tightrope walk between the summits of New York’s Twin Towers in 1974 is poignant from the point of view of our present; Petit carefully traverses a point in space that events have since effaced.  It seems like a dream.  Wallinger’s text in the book accompanying this exhibition unfolds this moment as a succession of perceptions, impressions and references.  Through Beuys’ naming the towers in 1975 Cosmos and Damien (who were the Syrian twin brothers who practiced the art of healing) to Wallinger’s realisation that the image of the cricket wicket painted on walls by Indian, Pakistani and West Indian New Yorkers is a graphic depiction of the twin towers.

Elsewhere Dublin is the place where Leopold Bloom responds to an advertisement to purchase “sandy tracts from the Turkish government” at an address in Berlin where the Palestine Development Company was based.  Until 1918 Palestine was in the Turkish Empire. The shifting lines in Wallinger’s text resonate in the exhibition’s objects.  A painting by C.R.W. Nevinson, The Road from Arras to Bapaume, 1917 depicts a razor-edge straight road cut through a landscape to the horizon.  The landscape is barren, like a desert.  Military transport and soldiers file to and from the vanishing point, through Europe’s killing fields.  Elsewhere we find lines between insect and human, in drawings by Hooke and Stubbs, and the interface of skin in the ‘Dying Gaul’, an anonymous 19th century copy of an antique sculpture and a later version of the same pose as an écorché.

Whereas Wallinger could be accused of effecting a mere mix and match of themes, what is exciting about this exhibition are the palpable relationships produced between objects, in the way, for instance, the show moves from Renato Bertilli’s Profilio Continuo (Head of Mussolini), to a set of Eadweard Muybridge images to a Klein bottle.  The spacing and switching between modes of viewing – between a work of art, a model of thought and scientific speculation – marked not only frontiers but also points of displacement and transition.

It is rare to see an exhibition where an artist of Wallinger’s stature curates in a way that goes beyond creating a snap shot of a contemporary milieu where the longest reach is a close knit group of artist comrades.   It is – by extension – rare to see an exhibition by a non-artist curator that can engage as effectively with objects ,spaces and such a wond erfully nuanced sense of signification as Wallinger has achieved in a show which literally works the hang as a form of composition.

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CY TWOMBLY: Cycles and Seasons

Tate Modern, London until September 14 (Bankside, London, 020 7887 8888).

The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London’s Tate Modern is a bracing reminder that, before all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, informality can border on the infantile in its extremes of slightness and scatter.

This show, which is curated by Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall and then Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since the artist’s retrospective 15 years ago at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Twombly, who turned 80 this year, makes big, intellectually ambitious paintings and elemental sculptures that are complex in their interaction with other art and artforms. But he never lets us lose sight of art’s simplest instincts and manuvers, almost taunting the viewer with the base, raw impulses he lets loose.

His art embraces contradiction. In room after room, this survey offers spare yet dynamic canvases, or cruddy yet evocative sculpture. However nonchalant his painterly marks may seem, they are somehow taut and expressive nonetheless. Almost scatological in their oozing and dribbling, his paintings are unfailingly elegant.

There is also a dichotomy in Mr. Twombly’s work between the verbal and the non-verbal: Writing is key to his work — often there is text scribbled into his canvases, and titles manifest connections with poetry — but equally vital is a sense that splodges and gestures form an arcane system of pre-verbal expression.

This juggling act, sustained over half a century, is essential to Mr. Twombly’s achievement. But it also accounts for his rocky ride in terms of esteem. Because he taps reserves of brutalism and classicism in equal measure, he is apt to appear too effete to one camp, too grubby to the other. And the combination of rough textures and smooth literary reference may well account for his greater success in Europe than America.

And yet, the Americanness of Mr. Twombly’s influences and ambition are as striking as his European refinement. Art historically speaking, he was the kid brother of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — he was Rauschenberg’s classmate at Black Mountain College, the legendary North Carolina experimental art college, and later his traveling companion and studio mate — offering a similar kind of cool, deconstructive coda to Abstract Expressionism. Early canvases in this show, such as “Criticism” (1955) with its graffiti-like scratching on white house paint were named at random in studio games with Johns and Rauschenberg.

In contrast to these peers, however, Mr. Twombly is more an extender than an ender of the AbEx tradition: He literalized the metaphor of handwriting in the free flowing drips of Jackson Pollock. His work also bears a striking affinity with the late work of Arshile Gorky in the way it joins drawing and painting, each at its most elemental, on the canvas.

From the outset, Mr. Twombly’s touch is unmistakable, and the way he sustains informality on a large scale is prodigious. What is very striking about this show, however, is the diversity of his oeuvre. He anticipates or responds to major stylistic shifts of the last half-century while also retaining his personal idiom.

This is another of his contradictions. He is clearly a fearless individualist, and yet at crucial junctures he seems to have been open to criticism and willing to be swayed. When his opulent, indulgent painterly works from the early 1960s, described as “baroque” and made in borrowed studios in Italy, were dismissed by the Minimal artists who held sway at that time in New York, Mr. Twombly capitulated to the criticism and returned to the austerity and monochrome of his 1950s abstraction. The pair of massive, multi-paneled canvases titled “Treatise on the Veil” (1968 and 1970) resemble schoolroom chalkboards — the earlier version has a painterly, all-over black ground in oil based house paint, with markings in white wax crayon sketching out rectangular forms with what look like hastily written calculations and instructions charting a horizontal line towards the bottom of the composition. These minimal works, described in the catalog as an ellipse within the exhibition, could equally be said to hinge the expressive abundance of the works that preceded and followed.

For soon Mr. Twombly was back on form, indulging his penchant for combining writing and primordial marks in compositions of bombastic lyricism. “Hero and Leandro” (1981–84), a painting in three separate panels, evokes the tragic tale of the drowned lovers in a downward rush of brushmarks that alternate between washed out and globular, fluent and agitated. The name “Leandro” is scrawled with a defiant pity that follows the flow. There is a strong acknowledgement of JMW Turner in the palette and application.

Exalted citations of poetry and classical myth were to prove a compelling influence on the emerging new expressionists of the 1980s such as Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, and Anselm Kiefer. It is around this time that Mr. Twombly secured his modern master status in the art world.

A sumptuous work, “Untitled (A Painting in 9 Parts)” (1988), represents the artist at his most traditional looking, bordering on the Rococo. Shown in the Italy Pavillion of the 1988 Venice Biennale, these paintings, on wood panels, inscribe verses of Rilke in Monet-like feathery and washy applications of oil paint and watercolor in watery greens and whites. Two of the panels are elaborately shaped in a way that recalls 18th century Venetian artists such as Tiepolo.

But in the 1990s the artist pulled back from this decadent-seeming extreme to reconnect with a more modernist impulse. His “Four Season” cycle (1993–94) explores a lexicon of shapes appropriate to each season, with barely legible tracings of Keat’s Poem, the Human Seasons (1818) as textual and textural counterpart to these bright colors and expressive gestures.

Mr. Twombly’s sculpture has been a significant part of his output from the beginning of his career, with a break in production between 1959 and 1976. Made from found objects, which are sometimes cast in bronze, they are typically coated in roughly applied white paint, and they, too, often have writing scribbled into the surfaces. They find the artist in his most archaic mode, and emphasize the brutal, primitive aspect of classicism, as opposed to its refinement. Tomb-like forms like “Untitled (In Memory of Alvaro De Campos)” (2002) are at once elegiac and elemental.

The show ends with a riot of color and a lyricism with the “Bacchus” (2005) series. These mammoth canvases reconnect with the pre-scriptural scratched abstractions of the 1950s while distilling the artist’s lifelong engagement with poetry and myth. In a rich red that hovers between wine and blood, evoking Homer’s “wine dark sea,” these great all-over dripping loops of thick, bold line are marvelously poised between tension and fluency, a final coming together of the artist’s competing impulses to inscribe and describe, to record and to let go.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 17, 2008, under the heading “Smears, Scribbles and Scratches: Twombly at the Tate Modern”

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Fermin Rocker himself had recognized that his current show at the Chambers Gallery in London would be his last.

For some time he had been tired. His eyes were not as good as they were, and walking the few yards to the studio with its north light – at the back of his top-floor flat in Tufnell Park – was becoming difficult. It was even possible that the private view would be his last or penultimate excursion from the flat, for even with the help of his devoted son and amanuensis, Philip, going down all those mansion-block stairs presented formidable problems. But, after a 48-hour flu, the 96-year-old Rocker died in his bed on Monday. There had always been a good chance he would die brush in hand, but it was not to be.

The possibility that the private view – to which Mick Jagger has lent his classic Rocker painting of a refugee scene – might have been the artist’s penultimate sortie refers to an event that will be taking place in December at Toynbee Hall: the publication of a new edition by Five Leaves Press of his father Rudolf Rocker’s 1956 autobiography, The London Years. This event will surely want to celebrate the son as well as the father he adored.

Fermin Rocker was born in 1907 in the old East End, the son of Milly Witkop, immigrant Yiddish-speaking radical daughter of, for that generation, untypically tolerant orthodox Jews, and of Rudolf Rocker, the legendary anarchist theoretician and practitioner and a German Catholic. Rudolf taught himself Yiddish and English and became the recognised leader of the Jewish sweated workers in the East End, as well as editor of the Yiddish anarchist weekly, the Arbeiter Fraint. Fermin’s father was a disciple of Prince Peter Kropotkin and it is possible that the boy, who sat on Kropotkin’s lap, was the last living person who had met the great man.

Fermin himself wrote an enchanting account of his early childhood in Stepney at 33 Dunstan Houses, an anarchist commune. Appropriately published by the anarchist house Freedom Press, The East End Years (1998), which contains the author’s characteristic illustrations and some rare photographs, picks up on the title of his dad’s memoir and is far better written.

Rocker père wrote many books, some of which are still read by anarchists and the larger number of students of the movement, but he was a man of action, whose memorial is his life as a radical political activist – described in a famous and influential book, William J. Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals (1975), a book that means much to East End anoraks of all persuasions such as the late Nicolas Walter, Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein, Arnold Wesker, Clive Bettington (top walking tour guide of the East End since Fishman’s retirement) and myself.

Fermin, the only child of Rudolf’s second marriage, would not become a man of action, in the father’s sense at least. The shy and self-effacing boy was a precociously gifted draughtsman, and was taught drawing and watercolour by his half-brother. Rudolf took his young son to parks, museums and historical places, but it was the busy Port of London – the Heathrow of its day – that most enthralled the boy and it was there that he did his first drawings on visits with his father:

“In an age which held that children should be seen and not heard, he treated me with exemplary kindness and tolerance . . . In later years my father would look back at it with nostalgia and regret. It was a time, he insisted, that still had aspirations and ideals, that still had visions of a better future, of a world more just and humane.”

After the First World War – during which Rudolf was incarcerated in a detention camp at Alexandra Palace – the family went to Berlin, where the young Fermin went to art and print schools and associated with leading artists and politicians of the Weimar Republic. But he always said that the only artist who made a real impression on him was Kathe Kollwitz.

Fermin settled in New York in 1929. He worked as a freelance commercial artist, illustrator and printmaker, and worked on pre-Disney cartoons such as Betty Boop. From 1937 he began to concentrate on etchings and lithographs. As a painter he was drawn to the American realist school and the “ashcan” painters such as John Sloan, whose paintings (one or two are in the Metropolitan Museum) surely influenced the younger artist. He had solo exhibitions in New York in 1944 and 1961.

In 1972, retired from the commercial fray, Fermin Rocker with his editor wife, Ruth, and young son moved to London. He continued working as a book illustrator, but was eventually able to devote himself to painting. In the last 20 years of his life he had 13 solo exhibitions (mainly at the Stephen Bartley Gallery in London), which is surely some kind of record for a man of his age, but only of real significance if the work stands up.

Well, serious critics such as William Packer, John Russell Taylor and Mel Gooding wrote in praise of him. “The compositional deliberation gives these pictures something of the rapt intensity of a Balthus, the dramatic presentiment of a Hopper,” wrote Gooding in Arts Review.

Rocker was duly flattered, as he should have been, by these comparisons, but he always resisted my own references to Edward Hopper, in conversation and in print. Some fellow painters, including Paula Rego – whom I recall listening enthralled to his stories and who shares his particular admiration for Goya, Daumier and Degas and who also resists when people link her own work to that of Balthus – found aspects of his work, graphic and oil and later acrylic, to their taste.

Why do I love his work? It is because it is self-evidently rooted deep in his psyche, like a dream or an obsession, and reiterated in a late flowering because his very life depended on it. He continually reworked his themes because the visual problems raised by thinking his feelings remained ongoing but had to appear to be solved before he could progress, progress towards a deeper interrogation of the past, a deeper interrogation of Matthew Arnold’s “land of dreams” which lies “north of the future”, in Paul Celan’s phrase.

His sites of memory, occasionally recognisable through their idealised visionary topography transfiguring a prosy flatness, are in fact sites of remembrance, which can be defined as memory laden with psychic significance, like a ghostly treasure ship. Their space is a metaphor of time, of heroic days recalled without nostalgia, when information technology was young, and politics, for us or against us, was personal. His figures, his figurations, are objective correlatives for images seen with the inner eye, their tonalities subtly muted, without strong contrasts – the later re-workings of his hand mirroring the workings of his mind.

One of the great pleasures of life, for me at any rate, is to visit old-timers, usually at teatime, men and women of my parents’ generation with stories to tell and lessons to teach. In the nature of things – and as my generation itself approaches old-timer status – their number is diminishing. Only the other day, I visited Fermin Rocker with Bill Fishman, the writer Peter Gilbert and the medical anthropologist and doctor Cecil Helman, who observed that Fermin was looking very well, often the sign of a last-minute rally and push for life.

He had painted my portrait and Helman’s and he was intending to paint Gilbert’s. His method was, as Paula Rego pointed out, time-honoured but now very unusual: he would make sketches from the model, and then watercolours from the sketches and the model, finishing with oils.

Fermin Rocker saw and experienced many things. He kept faith with a spiritual truth, which matured over a lifetime. Now this mensch has joined his ancestors and I mourn his passing. But I rejoice that, with the support of his son and some friends, he survived so long, fit enough in mind and body to continue making art almost to his dying day. May he rest in peace, and may some of his paintings last as long as our troubled planet survives

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Alec Chanda studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1979 to 1983. He won second prize in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1992. Twenty years after he left art school, his first one-artist exhibition took place in a studio space beneath London’s Westway motorway. It was dominated by six large oil paintings, each approximately 200 x 240 cm., that took most of a decade to paint (in succession). Each of these works had a marked freshness and individual atmosphere, yet each was also, in a sense, the same work painted, again and again, from scratch. The effect, however, was not of repetition but of rediscovery.

Chanda’s large works are clearly the outcome of an obsessive vision. His approaches to subject, conception and technique consistently yield a complex multi-figure group, rich in painterly vitality, moving in and out of focus, and communicating a sense of personal psychic necessity. That this exhibition was not held in a commercial space was consistent with the works’ manifestation of a private, enclosed world.

Each painting builds on a diverse range of source images. In their original contexts these recorded situations or told stories. Chanda uses such narratives as a spur in a work’s early stages, but as painting progresses each component image takes on its own character, and Chanda’s. A work’s eventual subject is new and not definable by its sources. Combining images derived from past art with others made from life, each painting generates its own independent dream space.

Chanda draws incessantly from the source images he selects. He transfers the results to acetate, along with drawings from life, and then projects these individually onto canvas, providing the initial basis for the marks he makes in paint. He realises one figure at a time in this way. Over months, the final composition develops through an unpredictable process of accretion. Figures are deliberately taken to different degrees of resolution. Paradoxically (in so closely inter-knit a painterly complex), a central concern is to give a sense of the distinctness of each figure. The painstaking process is in conscious contrast to the apparently seamless transmission of much imagery in today’s art and media.

Each painting is about a range of personal preoccupations, both in the art of the past and in Chanda’s own life. But (in his words) ‘the subject is not external to the work, but is what actually happens within its four edges’. It is about these figures (metamorphosed from their source appearance), about their relationships, and about the way they occupy the particular space Chanda creates. It is also about the very process of the emergence of each painted figure into palpable form. The passage of time during which Chanda achieves the image becomes, itself, part of a work’s subject.

Chanda’s criterion for deciding when a figure is complete is that it be real to him (irrespective of how – or how easily – the viewer may read it). It is therefore apposite that in each picture the figure in sharpest focus seems always to be a kind of self portrait. The deliberate variety of degrees of focus between the figures in a single work heightens the viewer’s sense that emergence into form is itself one of these works’ key themes. A certain ambiguity plays a constructive role; it is one means of asserting the equal reality of a painting as representation and as paint. Each work communicates Chanda’s relish for the pigments of which it is composed. He makes his own paints, using ancient colours that combine richness with restraint. With these he both builds form and creates what he describes as ‘a sleeve of atmosphere’ of veiled light. Among other things, this is a legacy of his observation of crowded scenes in the bright but dust-filled air of Indian cities.

Chanda follows simultaneous impulses towards the realisation of sculptural form and a partial disguising of the resulting images. His works contain further creative oppositions. Each large painting is a hybrid, in that its imagery comes from diverse sources, each motif having been separated from its original context before being ‘digested’, sometimes by re-drawing and always by transfer and re-creation in paint. Chanda sees the initial uprooting as a kind of violence, yet his emphasis is on a restorative fusion and unity in each finished work. So resistant is he to doing violence to any figure that he cannot bring himself to crop it. This is one reason why the figures in his large paintings go all the way to the ground (on which they stand in a ‘real’ way), and why there is always a margin of space between the complete group and the canvas edge.

Paradoxically, Chanda is preoccupied at once by space and by flatness. It is important to him that his figures occupy space convincingly, yet through his insistence on the tightness of each grouping this space is deliberately squeezed. Beyond the main figure grouping he establishes deep space, but he counteracts this by using devices such as a connecting sweep of paint to tie each group to the canvas edge. Each group faces the viewer, as if on a stage. The figures are, of course, acting out the story of their invention by Chanda’s imagination, but a stage-like character derives also from his tendency to look at a painting as he imagines a sculptor might look at a relief.

Another contrast these pictures resolve is that between the speed of Chanda’s paintmarks and the no less strongly communicated slowness of the process by which each painting is created. Unsatisfied till an image has been thoroughly realised, Chanda is closer to the painstaking processes of Giacometti than to the appropriation and direct quotation employed in much art today, with its corresponding rapidity of impact. His own paintings unfold for the viewer with a slow amplitude. This is so despite (as well as because of) the constant dialogue between the sense of finality in each composition and the continuous movement it displays – of people, of light and of painterly gesture. Chanda’s heroes include Hals and de Kooning, no less than Giacometti; their paintings all show a telling nervous vitality. But equally important is the stability, coupled with invention, of Poussin, Chardin and Morandi (as well as, contrastingly, Guston’s psychological freedom within a depictive, painterly process). There is a connection between Chanda’s fascination with synthetic Cubism and his admiration for the relief sculptures of Dick Lee (one of his teachers), which demonstrated a willingness to take anything from anywhere, in order to create a new whole.

It is important for Chanda that the viewer be able to believe in the reality of each painting, both as a pictorial construction and as depiction. Yet he loves accidents and ambiguities in art and is therefore happy to retain these in a picture when they are necessary to something that takes precedence even over comprehension by the viewer, namely the reality of the painting in terms of Chanda’s own imagination and formal sense. This, perhaps, is why the viewer can feel simultaneously unsure of quite what is going on in one of these large paintings, yet also that it is satisfyingly complete.

In the exhibition, the large paintings faced a wall hung with some twenty-five small recent pictures painted in oil and egg tempera on paper, in a quite different, brighter palette. These were made swiftly, on a crowded Spanish beach, from direct observation. They show sharp contrasts of light and shade, the brilliant colours of beachwear, chairs and umbrellas and figures caught swiftly as if with the odd but truthful instantaneity of a snapshot. These works abound in lively and unpredictable conjunctions of form. Unlike the large canvases, each had to be achieved quickly, often in much less than an hour, and in a situation where Chanda had much less control over his motif. For all these reasons, the ‘look’ of these pictures is very different, yet the results are revealing of some of the constants in Chanda’s work. Recognisable instincts can be seen at work, toward the compression of figure groups and toward the creative elision of figure and ground (and equally of forms that in reality are widely separated spatially). Reportage and construction are kept continuously in balance. The paint is applied precisely, yet with a delightful freedom and fluidity. The works combine the familiar sense of concentrated engagement with a telling directness – even abruptness – that it would be interesting to see introduced into future large pictures.

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