Exhibitions
Renato Tosini (Dover Street Gallery, till 19 May) Alfred Wallis and Patrick Hayman (Crane Kalman, till 10 June) Feliks Topolski (David Messum, till August)
The agonies of man
Giles Auty
he death of painting has been predict- ed with great regularity during my years of involvement with the visual arts. Often the Prophets of doom have a vested interest through forecasting something they hope Will come about, so reinforcing their own Power as esteemed interpreters of the sym- bolic meaning of inert and untransformed objects e.g. piles of old clothes. Perhaps the continued potency of painting unnerves them, causing them to reconsider the vitali- ty of their own extraordinary standpoints. This week, a casual wander in London's West End brought me into contact with the immensely varied productions of a Sicilian, a Pole, a New Zealander and Cornish scrap merchant. If we consider even briefly six centuries of European painting from about 1300 to 1900 — Giotto to Gauguin, if you like — you will find they enfold an abso- lutely staggering diversity. The tool of figu- rative painting did not seem in the least inadequate to scores of artists of genius, and hundreds of others of a quality rarely encountered these days. If we think, even for the length of time it took Marcel Duchamp to decree that various household objects were significant art, what the twin tools of printing and etching enabled Goya to do, in terms of humanistic and meta- physieal expression, we might be less anx- ious to attend painting's predicted funeral. Profound ignorance of history and of the scale of past achievements is the root cause of a great deal of contemporary silliness, whether in art or attempted interpretation.
Renato Tosini hails from a city — Paler- mo — where the pistol has traditionally provided a more natural implement of expression than the palette knife. This may explain why his exhibition at Dover Street Gallery (13 Dover Street, W1) is informed by an aristocratic world-weariness at the scale of human folly and corruption. Sicily is a land where Greek influence was once paramount. Tosini's work harks back to Greek drama and the strugglings of mere mortals with the Fates. His preferred char- acter is a balding, be-suited figure — a man of localised power glimpsed in naturalistic and symbolic settings. The men who appear menacing in the coffee shop, appear much less assured on a boat trip. Removed from their familiar levers of power or corrup- tion, the elders look vulnerable and afraid. The paintings are economical and elegant expressions of an almost literary disdain.
At Crane Kalman meanwhile (178 Brompton Road, SW3) we see how paint- ing became a tool of release for two trou- bled sensibilities. The tale of Alfred Wallis has been told so often as to become, to borrow a favourite adjective, a touch folk- lorique. Wallis was a small, crusty, semi-lit- erate Cornishman who was bound by the warping constraints of local non-conformist religion. He began painting at 70 when his wife died and was discovered almost imme- diately in 1928 by a brace of London swells, who were taking a gentlemanly break in West Cornwall. Wallis's art represented a kind of agonised floating to the surface of a repressed and fearful soul. Much of his subject matter was of boats and the sea, painted in enamel paint on torn-off lids of cardboard boxes. But the odd potency and even odder pictorial sophistication of Wal- lis's painterly sckaps affected Ben Nichol- son and Kit Wooa like a live wire. Painting released and redeemed Wallis in a way that seeking symbolic meanings from the clutter of junk in his store would never have done. It would simply have made him madder.
Hayman was born to a London Jewish family in 1915. The experience of New Zealand, reached after a long sea voyage, unlocked the brooding poet and painter in him. For Hayman the activities were often simultaneous and parallel. He returned to England and St Ives in 1947 and thereafter championed artistic intuition through his painting and writing.
For those sufficiently long in tooth or memory, the overriding memory of Feliks Topolski's art may be the wonderful draw- ings he did of those selected to sit on tele- vision Face to Face with John Freeman. Topolski's art had a frenetic fluidity com- bined with odd awkwardness. I felt at times 'The coffee shop, oil on canvas, by Renato Tosini his drawings resembled those of a great his- toric draughtsman — but drawn with the wrong hand while on speed. Bernard Shaw and Augustus John were admirers of Topolski's baroque and — for too long neglected skills. At David Messum (8 Cork Street, W1) 140 works coincide roughly with VE Day celebrations but the artist's wiry renderings of the reality of conflict and aftermath show the penalties which attend victory as well as defeat. Those who still believe the invention of the camera supplanted the need for anecdotal human recordings of a drawn nature can reflect on their folly at this show. Here the poetic and poignant combine in commemorative draw- ings, occasionally of incomparable skill.
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