Art
Thinking big
John McEwen
If there is a hot tip for international star- dom among younger British painters of the moment — among those, that is, born after 1950 — it is Christopher Lebrun (Nigel Greenwood Inc, 41 Sloane Gardens, SW1 till 18 June). Lebrun's first paintings at Greenwood two years ago looked oddly old-fashioned — a combination of sym- bolist, 19th-century Bocklin, and arcadian, 17th-century Claude, with only a certain lese-majesterial rough-and-readiness hin- ting at contemporary authorship. Never- theless they were large in size and unashamedly grand in aspiration, and the intervening time has served to whip them into stylistic shape. A flying, rearing, buck- ing white horse now increasingly dominates the centre of the canvas, surrounded by an ever more indecipherable darkness. This greater abstraction — the horse can be very sketchily drawn — would seem to owe a good deal to Lebrun's use of bigger brushes. These have also helped him to work quicker and — thanks to continual over-painting — he can now keep the whole surface fluid till the end. It adds the benefit of excitement and physical energy to his pictures and keeps him in line with contem- porary trends, which call for a rich more than a refined use of paint and metaphoric imagery in place of isolated self-expression. Lebrun is not ashamed to say that his pic- tures attempt to reintroduce 'nobility' as a subject once again, and this too fits well with a moment that finds us fighting a war of chivalry with Argentina. German painters are currently the international rage, and Lebrun will shortly have the honour of being the only outsider to share an exhibition with their leading lights at St Etienne, entitled Myth, Drama and Tragedy. This trio of subjects is more descriptive of the Germans' pictures than Lebrun's, whose expression is fanciful rather than dramatic. Such idiosyncracy, coupled with the remarkable progress he has made in technique, justifies the high
hopes which have already caused every painting in the present show to be sold.
Lebrun has also been selected for this year's international section at the Venice Biennale, and so has Anish Kapoor — of the same generation and hardly less highly thought of as a sculptor — who was born in Bombay in 1954, but has been resident in England since 1973 and is promoted, therefore, as a British artist. He is showing new sculptures at the Lisson Gallery, 66-68 Bell Street, NW I (till 12 June). Kapoor first came to notice through presenting variously fashioned mounds of pure pigment, but he soon found this too limiting and began in- stead to dust the objects with colour. Now even this dusting seems on the wane, as he becomes more involved with the con- trivance and arrangement of shapes. The shapes hint at traditional Indian motifs, particularly in the form of sexual totems, with colour increasingly used descriptively rather than as a uniform coat. In the most successful piece, both for overall coherence and originality of image, a tongue shape, powdered red, protrudes from the wall and seems to beckon convergent lines of male and female symbols. This arrangement suc- ceeds in being both erotic and exotic; near- by, it is run close in merit by what appears to be the last of the pigment pieces. Downstairs, however, doubts arise. His bonded and concreted objects definitely need the lustre of those powdered coats to catch the eye and the imagination. One has to return to the achievement of 'Red in the Centre' to be persuaded that Kapoor will prove to have staying power.
One of the internationally acclaimed Ger- mans referred to earlier, A. R. Penck, has come to paint in London, and his first ex- hibition here coincides with this event (Waddington Galleries, 34 Cork Street, WI till 18 June). To date, Penck's fame has rested on enormous pictograms, each one telling a story by means of stick figures and other symbols, both descriptive and mathematical. Their enormity and obvious spontaneity gives them a certain power, but his more recent work is so tidied up it even has references to Miro, and attempts to ar- rive at a standardised symbolic code already court the dullness of repetition demonstrated by the fact that lack of space has led to a painting called `Standart' being represented, apparently to no disadvantage, by only six out of ten of its component can- vases. The international scope of Penck's reputation and the cave-wall size of his pic- tures are disturbingly of a piece. `If stags were the size of ants we'd be stamping on 'em!' as an exasperated colonel once declared in defence of deer hunting. If Pencks 'were the same diminutive size as Klees' would there be the fuss? He is fur- ther benefited in the present show by shar- ing the space with Tom Phillips — much the same mid-forties age as Penck — darling of the British Council and once of the Marlborough Gallery. Phillips is an Oxford man and suffers, like many British 'artists', from over-education. His teensy half pain- tings/half sculptures are a positive celebra-
tion of the coyness, quirkiness and quaint- ness that have long been the indigenous diseases of English art. The show dents the gallery's respectability.
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