Art
Schismatic
John McEwen
If one single thing changed the nature of painting it was photography. Or, perhaps more accurately, if one thing altered the consciousness of painters it was photography. Because with well over a century's hindsight we can now see that, contrary to the forebodings of Turner and others, with photography painting took on a sparring partner rather than a challenger, and the sessions continue as spiritedly and unpredictably as ever. The closest, and therefore the most intense, interplay contests the ground of photographic representation once, in the general sense with which the word is used here, the prerogative of paint ing alone; and this in turn has long and inevitably devolved into the wider and schismatic argument of figuration versus abstraction that, most contentiously, has confronted painters. It is a fact that should always be borne in mind when viewing con temporary painting, especially of the figurative, representational — call it what you will — type, because if a painter does not grapple with it then you can be sure he is not an artist at all. It should certainly be remembered in the case of several worthwhile representational shows that are on at the moment.
Michael Andrews is one of the most overtly concerned with the problem in this country. His new paintings at Anthony d'Offay (till 24 June) are easily recognisable depictions of fish and ponds and rivers but if you study them for any length of time you will soon discover that they are equally to do with painting as an autonomous subject, an abstract question of marking surfaces. This surface interest is most pronounced in the four large acrylic paintings (one of them unfinished) where canvas as coarse and husky as sacking has, for the most part, been sprayed rather than brushed with colour, thus emphasising the harsh imperfections of the Material in contrast to the limpid world of fish in water that the paint ultimately can be seen to represent. The work attempts to reconcile all manner of opposites in a single, image, and in so doing it consciously uses photography as a conciliatory medium — so openly in fact that in one instance the image itself, barracuda and skipjack tuna in the ocean depths, would have been impossible without it. In painting translucent aquarium fish, in painting fish in water and water at all, Andrews is also deliberately setting up very hard subjects for himself. He is working beyond the ken of genre painting. The two large paintings of fish in aquaria look all too like aquaria in their slack formlessness, but opposite the unfinished picture of barracuda and a downward view of pike and roach, in which the glint of the water surface
defeats him, display a much tighter con" positional control. Downstairs his water' colours, though pleasantly pastoral, are much less challenging and not improved bY his inability to capture depth. Andrews's earlier work matched London urbanity with a painterly and rather American realism. Is was fresh but overestimated. His paintings today, which are also said to be metaphors of human existence, are less spontaneous but much more adventurous — not a! metaphors, they would be rather banal it that were their salient point, but as an inte rogation of painting itself by an artist enter' ing his maturity. Anthony Green (Rowan till 6 July) also knows his art historical onions. His rer resentational method is a sort of latter-daY cubism — his paintings are often irregular la shape to accommodate a multi-angled viei, of one subject — with, especially when 'S comes to expressing his love for his wife, s rather too obvious dash of Chagall. Ho' ever Green is an RA and, not only that, his work is the most popular of the RA's with the general public. It is easy to see why. paintings unashamedly deal with bourgeois subjects: the rooms of his interiors are Inv; ingly (and in many passages skilfullY) painted inventories of surbiton kitsch. 14° invariably paints his mother or himself or himself with his wife. He celebrates the banal, and in so doing he does of course very unbanal thing. His work, for instance, iS thought far too lowbrow for the highbroYd. He is not in the Tate. And this is unfair because he is far from being an unsophis' ticated painter despite a faux naif style. The, current show displays him trying to extend his range with some semi-circular an rather dull night-scenes, but as before it jail; his detailed interiors that his gusto is bos and most originally expressed.
Patrick Procktor, whose latest batch
oils, watercolours and aquatints crowd the (walls of the Redfern (till 28 June) has f0,f many years now seemed content to fulfil his role as a less rich man's David HockneY. The subject matter is derived from the sarlie mixture of spicey travel and London dorn' e ticity, a title like 'Ossie apres bain' (adlnir tedly from 1966) summing it up though t,11.et blunter David would surely not have sat' ; in French. Procktor is a wistful, unasserthi' artist, at sea with oils, happier though radio! conventionally so with water-colours orsu best in the suite of six aquatints of Venice' The self-consciousness of a models artist's position both with regard to rc. resentation and art in general is direct', confronted by Deboeck Robert's drawto,g6 and photographs (Barry Barker till ,0 June).. Barker is about the only person %lit puts on the continental avant-garde all" 0 can only be hoped that he can open 0,0 proper gallery soon. At present he 0'0,, out of a single room at 37 Museum Streit Robert's work is interesting because .4 shows a young and respected Belgian ae1110 abandoning conceptual paradoxes ,A, address himself once more to good 01" fashioned drawing.
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