Art
Eye-deceiving
John McEwen
No artist's work differs more in appearance from show to show than Michael Craig Martin's, but on reflection it can be rec ognised that the logic of his enquiry has remained utterly consistent. His latest exhibition (Rowan till 8 November) is no exception. His room at the Hayward Annual last year displayed a series of raw canvases with a single shelf protruding from their centre supporting a glassful of water. It was an optical double-bluff: looked at head-on they became trompe l'oeils but the reverse of the norm. The eye was deceived into thinking the glass and the ledge were unreal. And the work contained various other elegant conceits. A painterly palindrome, for instance, in the way the image projected into real space instead of, as is customary, receding into an illusion of it. Even the reflections delicately cast by glass and water became a metaphorical expression of an understanding viewer's state of mind.
The new work would appear to have nothing to do with this. You are confronted with four murals. They are positioned at intervals round the Gallery but their scale each one extends from floor to ceiling is dramatic, all the more so perhaps because the objects they depict are enlarged out of all proportion to their real-life size. There are twelve of these commonplace objectsan empty sardine-can, pliers, a watch, a book, etc depicted in starkly linear identikit fashion and divided and grouped into four distinct designs. The lines seem to have been drawn onto the walls but are in fact composed of tape. In the basement gallery the designs appear at one twelfth of their mural size, this time as tape on acetate, and framed. The finished mural is therefore at several removes from the original drawings Craig-Martin did in his studio: transparent acetate has been laid over these drawings and tape has traced their images onto its surface. Then photographs have been taken projected as transparencies onto the walls upstairs and the designs marked out in tape once again. Not the least ingenuity of this method of making pictures is that problems of transportation, insurance and bulk are eliminated.
A Craig-Martin of whatever size can be brought to life on the other side of the world with the aid of nothing more than some chart-black tape and a slide. But the importance of this practical, and spatial, aspect of the work should not be exaggerated. What is more interesting is how the tape pieces slowly reveal their similarity to the apparently totally dissimilar pictures that contained the ledges and the glassfuls of water: transparency and reflection are again of key importance; the final object could be made without the artist being present; and the trompe l'oeil theme is once more exploited the murals have a 3-D effect of extending into the room. But for Craig-Martin these pictures are also intended to convey a whole metaphysic on the subject of picturing. Recently he allowed two of the present drawings to be illustrated with a coinplementary text by him underneath. The first statement read: 'The presence of light lets many things appear that could not appear in the dark.' A profundity becomesa crashing truism. In much the same way hist murals, for all their icebergian depths 0' content, end up as objects perilously close to banal design. Seen with a text, however, and in the context of what has gone before, they confirm him nontheless as one of the wittiest artists around. Three interesting exhibitions close this weekend. A charming display of The Art of the Brazilian Indians' (Museum of Mankind till 31 October) collected over the past ten years by Sandra Wellington, which amPlY demonstrates that holy innocence still exists among the tribes and that a Winston Chur" chill Fellowship has been more than jus; tified in recording it; an exhibition 0' Gunther Grass's drawings and prints (Patrick Seale till 27 October; Hobson GallerY, Cambridge, 9 NOvember 8 December)' which proves the old point that literary men invariably make all too literal artists; and a small but select Ivon Hitchens Retrospective currently in the complementary set" ting of the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (till 29 October), then to Sheffield, MapPin Art Gallery 25 November 7 January); Reading, Museum & Art Gallery (13 Jaw ary 10 February); and Portsmouth, CitY Museum & Art Gallery (17 February 14 March).
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