As the trompe l'oeil in his Filofax print betrays, Anthony
Whishaw is a contradiction: a cerebral artist whose means of expression is thoroughly physical. His paintings have always announced their existence as Objects, and underlined it by incorporating matter in the paint: bits of wire mesh, rope and passing flotsam and jetsam — even, in a painting in his new show at Art First, model bulls from the tops of Domecq brandy bottles. Yet his art is less concerned with objects than with how we see them, especially that critical moment preceding vision, before visual stimuli resolve themselves into a fixed image. So he hangs about the doors of perception like a stage-door Johnny waiting for halfformed glimmerings to emerge into consciousness, and while he waits amuses himself — and us — by playing sophisticated visual games. Tucked behind his studio door is his latest invention: a trompe 1'061 play apparatus called 'Sportif in which bouncing painted balls tied to painted string hang from real nails — well, all real except one which is painted, just to confuse. (In a smaller version, `Sportif II', in the new show, the single nail is real, but its shadows are painted.) Because emerging images need space to develop, Whishaw has recently favoured the triptych format. At his last exhibition at Stephen Lacey Gallery two years ago, he showed a series of massive triptychs inspired by trees. More recently, his largescale work has focused on the reflectivity and surface tension of water, with its suggestions of different sorts of space: shallow space, deep space and, of course, 'space in the mind'. A large triptych, 'Pond', dominates his small exhibition at Art First, humming with suband super-aqueous life, whilst subtly unbalancing us with the skewed tilts of its three planes. But most of the show consists of 'Maverick Images', small, teasing, irregular-shaped canvases that revisit earlier experiments of a few years back. Their size was partly dictated by necessity: next spring Whishaw's studio undergoes major renovation, seriously curtailing his storage space. But restricting his freedom has brought out his playful side, in this motley series of multipanelled pictures patched together, it appears, from random components.
As so often with Whishaw, appearances are deceptive. A collection of small meditations on sea and sky seems to be formed from horizontal bands of colour cobbled together from the disassembled planks of an old beach hut, until you realise they're not made of wood at all, but sections of canvas carefully plastered, scored, pitted and painted to look like it. Seeing is believing: stare closely at the surface of 'Out to Sea' and all you see is waterlogged wood, where the salt spray's action has peeled away years of overpainting to expose the ridges of wood grain stained with original colour. Stand back, on the other hand, and you see an expanse of wet tidal sand, light sparkling on water and a deep-blue horizon under the pale burnished gold of a setting sun. Both are illusions: we are doubly deceived, by the picture as image and the picture as art.
In another series exploring internal spaces, a different form of deception is practised. Here it's a game of perspectives and volumes vested in colour to 'set up expectations, then deny them all'. In the gaily coloured polyptychs 'Interior with Dust Particles' and 'Contradictions', Whishaw appears to open the secret panels of a conjurer's box and lay them out flat, so that they somehow still magically contrive to lure the eye into imaginary corners and down illusory steps, like a virtual tour through a modernist fairground maze. He calls one of these compositions after Pandora, though you couldn't imagine his jaunty box of tricks releasing all evils into the world. The world could do with more such deceptions, not less. It's now eight years since this thoughtful artist's last touring exhibition, organised by the Barbican in 1994. Time for another, to remind the public that beautifully crafted painting can also be an art of ideas.
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