ARTS
Exhibitions
Martin Fuller: Recent Paintings (Austin/Desmond, Bloomsbury, till 1 February)
Country heavens, urban hells
Giles Auty
Slowly those who make up the world of London art have drifted back from their seasonal festivities to prepare for the Lent term. Most commercial galleries have re- opened at last, providing us art critics with gainful employment once more and a renewed sense of purpose in our lives. Otherwise familiar figures swim past one's gaze wearing scarves or ties which can only have been Christmas presents. The first major assembly of the year has taken place already in honour of Frans Hals, a famous Old Boy. Before that, however, two lumi- naries of the lower sixth had already begun the new term promisingly with widely contrasting exhibitions.
David Leverett's show at the Redfern (20 Cork Street, WI) is remarkable for its scale and ambition. Four huge paintings, roughly eight feet by ten feet in size, remind us that while German romanticism may be transcendental or apocalyptic in nature we Brits prefer the pastoral version. Probably the great spirit of British pastoral romanticism feels most at home in sheep- fold or beechwood. However, in David Leverett's exciting visions he is forced to perform an angelic hang-glide some hun- dred or so feet up, sailing windborne above the Yorkshire Dales. At heart, Leverett's four giant paintings, which form the core of the show, are landscapes in which hills, vales, dells, stone walls and copses provide pictorial counterpoint to rearing cloud masses. Shadows fall across land and sky to introduce further contrast. These are hon- ourable and ambitious paintings from an artist in his middle years.
Unusually for paintings from the late 20th century, their sentiment is affirma- tive. Leverett is interested in the life- 'Flights of Icarus' by David Leverett, from The Sacred Garden Series', 1988-1989 enhancing poetry of landscape and treads a fascinating and difficult pictorial path be- tween description and drama. Sometimes an odd hard shape interferes with the illusion of atmosphere. Sometimes, too, Leverett's colour strikes me as too raw and clean to read as description rather than pigment. This facet may be a throwback to the artist's earlier, more abstract modes. I do feel that these imaginative rural tone- poems might grow better still in the future from a more subtle modulation of their colouring. Such subtlety need not, in it- self, involve any loss of grandeur or indeed of intensity.
In recent years, Martin Fuller, who is the subject of an exhibition of new work at Austin/Desmond Fine Art (Pied Bull Yard, 15A Bloomsbury Square, WC1) has been a noted portrayer of the anguished battle between the sexes. Grimacing, priapic figures cavort or conjoin; one had imagined, for some odd reason, that the main impetus behind these works might have been autobiographical. Until recently the artist has been working on a relatively small scale which suited his brand of distinctive calligraphy admirably. Even his slightly larger works had the careless infor- mality of jottings on an envelope or news- paper. It is clear that the artist clings to and cultivates a childlike simplicity of means, however grown-up his message may be.
With a move to a new studio, however, he has felt freer to expand his scale. Much of the subject matter of this show is fresh also. Where molten glances across louche bars once provided artistic impetus and energy, the artist has switched his attention now to the elementally volcanic. The twisted contours of the earth's surface which Fuller encountered in New Mexico and Northern Ireland have become the subject of raw, semi-abstract paintings. Fuller responds not so much to the spirit of landscape as to the vital forces which threw up massive boulders and contorted hill- sides. Seemingly stark force or power of any kind fascinates him. The current way of working the artist uses reminds me, largely through its emphatic mark-making, of work produced in St Ives during the Fifties and Sixties by artists such as Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon.
Unlike Lanyon's, however, Fuller's approach to the landscape is far from romantic. Moor and desert strike the city- dweller in hirn often as mysterious or physically menacing. On the evidence of these two shows alone, those who find the art of landscape-painting arid, boring or devoid of philosophical content should think again.
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