Backs to the Wall 4 UNGLAND, that home of fanatical colourists,'
wrote Baudelaire. One wouldn't call Dick Smith exactly fanatical, but he's a major colourist, and in many ways very English. More than once I've seen his colour called Turneresque, and though that might not be the first adjective that occurs to you in his stunning retrospective show at the Whitechapel, it's not without relevance. It's transparently luminous, radiant, strong, and yet what Smith himself calls 'tender.' It's brushed on to the canvas in a liquid, translucent way which could be said to stem in the last resort from the great English watercolour tradition—one's always aware of the whiteness of the ground shining through. And above all, if one wants to press the Turner analogy, it's intimately bound up with illusions of space.
Colour in space is really the key to everything Smith has done. The very basic forms he invents to carry it are ways of projecting it into space, first as lines of perspective, more recently as actual shapes that come sailing out of the wall. One summer he made a tent for his children which was really one of his more daring colour- ideas pegged out on the grass, and I've seen drawings for ambitious projects on the same lines
—enormous blazoned colour-shapes supported with masts and guy-ropes out in the open air. With all the talk there is at the moment about a growing rapprochement between painting and sculpture, Dick Smith's work is often quoted as one of the most advanced outposts of the sculp- tural idea in painting. But it's essentially not that, however three-dimensional his canvases may be getting. All his paintings, as he's pointed out himself, retain a painting's prerogative of keeping its back to the wall. And anything further it may do from that position is relevant only to the literal or illusionistic projection of the colour.
• Shape is just another sort of frame for the con- tinuous coloured surface which makes a painting a painting.
This may all sound fairly abstract, the way one would talk about the abstract colour-stainers in America like Morris Louis, Noland or Olitski, for example (and, in fact, Smith's links with American painting are very strong. He divides his time equally between here and the Slates, and three of his most important one-man shows have been held in New York—which is largely why he's not as well known at home as he should be). In the popular, imprecise sense of the word, Smith's paintings are reasonably abstract; in the literal sense they're abstracted from a very signifi- cant range of images. Though you'd be pretty smart to deduce it from his present work, Smith was, in the late 'fifties, one of the original forces behind the rise of English pop art, and is still very much concerned with ideas of visual presen- tation—what he calls 'instant communication'— exemplified by mass media and the marketing procedures of a consumer economy. Spinning circles in some of his earlier paintings have a point of reference in a well-known Canada Dry neon-advert in Times Square. Later the famous Lucky Strike and Kent cigarette packs turned into a formal motif, hugely enlarged (the more-than- life-size scale on which commercial images are projected has profoundly influenced Smith's own sense of scale), and box-shapes dominate his paintings at every turn—not just as a formal idea, giving him multiple perspectives and angled surfaces to float the colour on, but because 'the carton is an incessant theme in present-day civilisation . . . you buy boxes when you are shopping, you do not buy visible goods. The box is your image of the product.'
There are other references in similar vein : the theatrical spotlight and the theatre-proscenium, the 'projection' idea behind the cinema's tech- niques of close-up and zoom-lens, the offset printing in colour reproduction. None of them is incorporated literally. But they give to all the grand deployments of colour and shape an intrinsic drama, a relevance, and that sort of extra glow which has been described as the `glamour' in Smith's painting. It adds up to an achievement of quite extraordinary quality and consistent level of accomplishment for an artist of thirty-five. There's only one small bit of nonsense in it, which seems to me distracting at Whitechapel, but that's how the artist wants it : he will insist on leaving little blotches and untidi- nesses on the canvas or in the construction of the stretchers, on the Pasmorish grounds that it humanises them if they're not too immaculately finished. That romantic English fallacy apart, the show could stand comparison with anything that's being done today anywhere. It would be even stronger with some of the best pieces which are now in Venice for the Biennale. But it's still strong enough. No one could call this English painting provincial, or anything but a profoundly original contribution to the 'sixties.
DAVID THO M PSON
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