ART
GEOFFREY CLARKE is twenty-eight, a post-graduate student at the Royal College of Art. His name has appeared several times in these columns, and, for his years, he has already achieved an unusual measure of success. His first exhibition, at Gimpel Fils, has set the cat amongst the critical pigeons. For one so young to have formulated so complete, unified and integral a language of symbols has seemed to some a matter for suspicion. The literary or mystical basis of this symbolism is by no means clear, and I for one have so far made little effort to comprehend it. The impact of the language itself, however, is immediate and considerable, and, though the shapes that are its words have gained wide currency during the past decade, the sentences into which Clarke forms them seem to me new and authentic. His iron sculpture, his stained glass, his aquatints are all of a piece—extensions in different mediums of an exceptional single- ness of purpose.
A certain dark flamboyancy—a solemn and almost Hebraic richness of statement—is offset by the strict technical discipline Clarke employs. The effect is at once austere and stimulating. The heavy encrustations of the " leading " in his plaster mosaics gives it the active, turbulent quality of early glass, but the whole smoulders rather than bursts into flame. The hammered rods of iron in parallel bundles, the horned crescents, the conceptual features, that combine to form his sculptured figures are monumental and hieratic. The aquatints are sophisticated, yet strong. Much young talent in Britain fails to mature, and there are those who deprecate early encouragement. I have, however, no hesitation in saying that Clarke is one of the two most interesting sculptors in metal to emerge in this country since the war, and that he is the most interesting worker in the moribund field of stained glass for I-don 't-know-how- much-longer. Peter Potworowski's meltingly seductive colour- schemes provide a change of climate at the same gallery.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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