Arts
From structure to surface
John McEwen
Stephen Buckley's new paintings (Knoedler till 3 August) are his most agreeable to date. Only two of the works in the Show, 'Shingles 2' and 'Tiny Crazy Paving', exhibit the aggression, the assault on the conventions of painting, that first brought him acclaim. In the literally tiny Tiny Crazy Paving' oiled fragments of one of his prints cover a wooden surface gapped like paving, the whole thing no bigger than the spread of a hand. In Shingles 2' the painting is staggered across three canvases, connecting bolts and threads all visible. Buckley has Spread the paint with his fingers and the ridges raised by this action have been sandpapered down to reveal a white undercoat showing through black and rce versa. The meagreness, the stark Improvisation of these paintings is in contrast with the bright colour and luscious surfaces of the majority of the remainder. Most of them continue his play with structure. He interlocks stretchers to Make one picture spill out of another, cuts the canvas into strips and interweaves it to activate the surface and so Un, the paint in some cases merely markMg the lines of this carpentry, sometimes in full, sometimes accentuating a particular feature. Overall, however, there is a Shift of emphasis from structure to surface, from sculpture to painting, which make these Buckley's most conventional Pictures to date. Apart from a greater attention to finish, there is a more complicated use of substances, applied, often, in contrast to the simplicity of the structures. Thus you get oil paint on acrylic Modelling paste on cardboard or, more augrnentatively, oil paint over polyurethane varnish on acrylic on paper on canvas. The pictures too are much smaller than before, some of them real jujubes. This small scale was dictated by lack of working space, but it also serves to make the smallest of them more like Objects and less like pictures than is the case when they are enlarged. They express the obduracy of his mixed media extravaganzas in another way. The weakest works are the ones in which this tension between sculpture and painting, however expressed, is missing, a relaxation that can lead to slackness — red, yellow and blue as a painterly theme has been done to death and there are two here. But on the whole the wit of his logical reductions, the humour of some of his contrivances, though muffled are still there, and the sense of exploration and enjoyment. It consolidates his position as our most stolidly non-referential painter.
David Nash has an exhibition of drawings and wooden sculptures at AIR (till 27 July). The drawings are of trees and framed with rather too much of an eye for the rustic, and the wooden pieces show a similar drift into whimsy. It all seems to have come about since Nash moved from the bracing air of London to the mists of a National Park in Wales, where they get ten foot of rain a year. As a result he has tended to forget about Brancusi and art and become much too much of a boy scout for his own good, generally allowing himself to be carried away by the wonder of it all. Thus, steaming quietly no doubt by his comforting hearth of an evening, he has knocked up some rustic 'multiples' while by day he has been out and about letting, wherever possible, the wood speak for itself. In other words there is more snapping and bending than chopping and carving, and a tendency to anthropoid jokes. Two or three solid early pieces should usefully remind him of his potential. It is a question of coming back before all is lost and he receives an ongoing appointment as artist-in-residence to the Forestry Commission.
Art about the nature of art, hence life, hence politics tends to need a great deal of explication (not explanation) to make its point. However all the explication afforded by five introductory pages as to the significance, social and otherwise, of John Stezaker's new exhibition of collages at Nigel Greenwood (till 22 July) does nothing to alter the facts. Little boxes contain generally interfered with photographs from love-story magazines of women being generally interfered with. Nothing explicit, but then that is the essence of voyeurism. So what? So nothing. We are told that `Stezaker's photo-montage activity can be seen, therefore, as an on-going exploration of the spacio-temporal conventions of film.' In the old days Stezaker might well have written this himself, now he leaves it to pthers. That is something.
The work of three famous photographers is currently viewable in galleries, though all of it could equally well be seen in the relevant books. E.J. Belloc, the Toulouse-Lautrec of the medium, is long dead. His famous series of New Orleans prostitutes accompanies an exhibition of the still living Clarence John Laughlin, another, more obvious, southerner, with his taste for the wry and fanciful, at the Photographers Gallery (till 30 July); while at the V & A (till 3 September) there is an array of the more harrowing newswork of the famous Time !Life photographer, Eugene Smith. Also at the Photographers Gallery (till 30 July) there is a somewhat conventional exhibition of photographs of India by William Wyse, and a miscellaneous selection taken by famous people in other spheres that reveals, rather disturbingly, that Dennis Healey has talent. Harry Secombe provides a wonderful portrait of Hancock, Stirling Moss two hilarious views of the results of a flash-flood in Las Vegas and Gerald Scarfe an even funnier sequence of his daughter's reaction to having her pushchair eaten by an elephant. There is also a Graham Greene study of a mouldering jungle fort in suitably pre-War looking colour.
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