Pieces of cake
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
If a carefully programmed and precisely re- corded study of the physical structure and properties of everyday objects is permissible for artists intent on getting down to first essen- tials, then two young artists holding one-man shows in London right now are behaving in an orthodox manner. Michael Vaughan is excavat- ing layer-cakes and sections of Battenberg slice in drawings, paintings and reliefs at the Hanover Gallery; Derek Boshier is making constructions from squares, triangles and half circles—domes —at the Robert Fraser Gallery.
Vaughan's cake architecture is matt in some places, shinily varnished and polished in others: we are forced to re-examine what we remember about cakes. Boshier's fantasy architecture is made of perspex covered with a grid (giving the effect of tiled walls) and makes great play with reflecting surfaces, transparencies, opaci- ties, and illumination of daylight through these transparencies as opposed to other objects with a dramatic built-in lighting of fluorescent tubes. The two have subtleties of lighting in common; and, though Vaughan's painted surfaces are discreet to the point of near-anonymity, they share with Boshier's a concern to project ideas without the distraction of familiar textures or other romantic surface associations. In Boshier's case, the materials—brilliantly coloured perspex offset by very dark blue or black areas—are half the message and indivisible from the form itself; with Vaughan that rich sobriety of execu- tion which distinguishes the best sign painting does not intrude between us and his cakes.
Vaughan is an artist who has always shown an obsessive feeling for the almost hallucinatory identity of ordinary objects in isolation, as well as a flair for metaphors which might extend their initial character. Early paint- ings dealt with motor bikes: a dissection of their separate parts so strange in its intensity that some paintings looked like gynaecology charts. There was an equation, and a convincing one, between engines and sexual apparatus. The same intensity was later brought to hear on empty rooms with dangling, unshaded light bulbs, girls sitting on sofas (this artist can give you second thoughts about chair legs and puff sleeves), chocolate bars partially unwrapped, and now cakes. These are shown in a wide variety of disconcerting aspects: a slice is re- moved, the event is echoed in a mirror, but the reflection has the texture and density of cake while the real object is grey and ghostly—and the rest of the cake reappears mysteriously on the other side of the mirror. Or else a Batten- berg slice is so enlarged that it looks like the facade of a suburban semi-detached, bow windows and all.
Colour is restrained to chocolate brown, ochre, a dirty synthetic pink (of strawberry sponge) and cream, appropriately enough. The general effect is extraordinarily dignified and solemn: these paintings, sometimes in bulging relief, sometimes flat, always weirdly illusion- istic, have the severity of ikons or early Italian primitive art. The drawings upstairs are masterly and state the case for the paintings with refreshing authority, though independently beautiful and inventive. Both paintings and drawings have a strong abstract character : the cake image recedes and we are left to investigate staircases, columns and vaults in a new and peculiar way.
Derek Boshier's show is glamorous with all that glow of intense colour and light; but he is producing objets de luxe, of a rather cerebral kind formally, though they link up logically with his earlier speculations on structure—in those days, advertisements, 3D devices, and square or rectangular format itself. The Ameri- can painter, Frank Stella, has been an influence here; lurking behind the Vaughans is the pos- sible ghost of Wayne Thiebaud, a west coast artist who draws and paints cakes less analytic- ally. Boshier, on present evidence, should be used for the stage; Vaughan_ is a connois- seur's artist in the traditional sense: I hope connoisseurs may rise to the surface and bite.
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