Art
Vegetable, animal, minimal
Evan Anthony
Who knows but that the way to an art patron's heart — and purse — may well be through his stomach. Operating on that premise, perhaps, Robert Carrier is using his Suffolk retreat, Hintlesham Hall, as, among other things, a rather large gallery — stately home style. Encouraged to wine and dine in picturesque surroundings, the overflow refugees from Islington and the local gentry are expected to develop an appetite for the pictures of Douglas Bland, businessman (" commercial manager ") and, of course, artist.
As an artist, Bland makes something of a meal of texture; a number of the paintings have the look of sections of slides seen under a microscope, with pretty, amoeboid patterns magnified. These segments are good enough for bits of imagery, but unfortunately the interesting moments they provide have been stretched into hours, so to speak. Titles like ' Dragon Dance' and ' Ariel ' may be of help to those lacking in imagination, but even with the hints, the canvases can't quite carry the weight of the sugar content.
More substantially decorative is the collection of decorative art and design from New York's Cooper-Hewitt collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This exhibition of eighteenthand nineteenth-century drawings, textiles and wallpapers shows: if nothing else, how seriously and beautifully some artists treated the ' applied arts.' Mere bandboxes and keys were fussed over as profoundly as were altar pieces and ceilings. It is an intriguing exhibition — one to give 'art directors' as well as architects cause for reflection.
There is little that suggests reflection in the work of Frenchman Jef Griboulet, at the Archer Gallery, Grafton Street; despite an attempt at expressionism ' Friboulet's work doesn't impress as either brutal or vigorous — would that it did. It is, alas, contrived. Using dark outlining to cut up the. image, the pictures come out as puzzle pieces stuck together. There is something irritating about this kind of painting — it tries so hard to be passionate but succeeds in being only plastic. Showing more life and originality, the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, has a reasonably good mixed show of artists "under 35." I don't know if that is the arbitrary age now fixed by the Arts Council as the-end of youth and promise, but it is a bright and entertaining display of originality and the not so original. Best of the lot, I find Michael Ginsberg's geometric pictures quite well done and worth a second look. His cunning paintings and drawings show the kind of skill and thought that involves the mind as well as the eye; and for a welcome change, you don't go away with the feeling that the paintings were really meant to be drawings, and vice versa. Barry King's 'photo-realist' acrylic gouache small pictures are interesting and admirable in technique, but limited in appeal by the coldness and dullness of their concern. Daniel Dahl has a cute idea but the cuteness palls and with his picture frames painted light blue or bright green or white, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the' joke or the subtlety, is just not 'enough.
Dahl's frame pictures could be considered first cousins to Alan Charlton's work at Nigel Greenwood's lovely premises at 41 Sloane Gardens. Charlton's tones of grey canvas frames surroundings grey canvas inserts look like so many condolence cards in search of inscriptions. The tones vary, the space is ample, but once the novelty of looking at nonpictures has gone, what else is' new?
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