Space explorer
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
The most engrossing and authoritative show in London at the moment by a contem- porary English artist is the group of recent paintings by Margot Perryman at the New Art Centre in Sloane Street. Miss Perryman's paintings have the virtues of ease and
assurance, serious thought, well concentrated visually, and the clear aura of digested experi- ence whether of life or the intricacies and nice- ties of art. Since these paintings are abstract, I assume that they contain a fusion of both with the responses of one feeding the insights of the other.
All the paintings—about twelve—are large and vertical, about six feet by five, the colour, predominantly blues, yellows and black, seems oddly and Uniformly artificial, free from any reference to natural appearances and the pre- vailing mood is one of coolness and calm. But inspection of any one painting shows at once that what appears to be a bland surface, con- ceals only momentarily a lot of lively action expressed in very subtle terms of edges, align- ments, disproportionate and unexpected scale, or in the way that empty space appears to be affected, inhabited even, by the action and inter- action of shapes containing it. The large spaces, seen as areas of pure colour, are also disrupted by watery shifts from one colour into another at the top or base of a painting.
This curious band of light, swishing like ripples of the sea at low tide, over the main body of colour, has the effect also of turning that space into a substance—like sand, for example. All is not at all what it seems at first glance: Miss Perryman leaves nothing alone, and nothing unaffected by these very strange dislocations and transmutations. I have rarely seen ambiguity so intelligently deployed or made quite so physically beautiful.
One painting is called Citadel and con- sists of a huge vertical -expanse of egg-yolk yellow which soars almost up to the top edge of the canvas before it 'is met and gently arrested by a strip of pale pink. Where the pink meets the yellow is a kind of sea shore wavery line of transparent greyed-gamboge: like transparent water reflecting a dark sky over bright yellow sand. This big field of hectic yellow, clouded by grey, turning into pink at the apex, is trapped between two other 'events.' On the left a big stretch of pale blue narrows at its base and swells out loosely, like the way water runs on the ground, at the top in a- fold shape. The pink with the blue and yellow is stunning: sharp, high-keyed, and very luxuri- ous, not unlike the impact of something quite artificial and brilliant in a wholly natural con- text—a girl, for instance, in one of those im- maculately sculpted sheaths of Courreges, in a wild landscape.
But on the right, an extremely dense, black wedge shape also swells upward, vertically. clipped off diagonally at its top : as dramatic, in its roughness and sharp and soft contours, as a big dark plank stuck in the sand of some deserted beach. Between this shape and the edge of the canvas is a tall narrow strip of light plum colour, slightly clouded, and you're not sure whether this colour is just caught in that vacant space or continues on behind the big plank shape. After a bit, as I've tried to ex- plain, you really don't care because this is just one ambiguous detail of a complete world in which nothing is what it seems; meanwhile, the painting transmits a powerful light, a sense of exterior space, and some sort of dramatic con- frontation between the dark plank-wedge shape rearing up and all that yellow, pink and blue space. Except that the space, on occasion, sud- denly turns into a solid, or a substance. There is also the sense of vast distances.
With this majestic and radiant painting, and with several others for that matter, Margot Perryman establishes herself as one of the best painters in this country. easily able to hold her_ own with Hoyland, Riley, and the handful. of , other youngish painters here who are trying to do something serious, difficult, and original— against the successive waves of American art which provided them, in the first instance, with a certain scale and insights. Miss Perryman's origins, for instance, were grounded in Clyfford Still and' Helen Frankenthaler, two fine Ameri- can artists of widely different character and generation. These allegiances have been so ab- sorbed that they are now invisible: what re- mains is something of the austerity and formal leanness of Still and a little of the expansive- watercolour charm of Frankenthaler, but the one aspect is now pushed into the realms of abstract-surrealism, the other is far more toughly composed from far less arbitrarily dis- posed elements.
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