Exhibitions
Ray Atkins Howard Hodgkin (Anthony d'Offay, till 24 November Leonard McComb (Browse & Darby, till 27 November) Ra'anan Levy (Crane Kalman, till 27 November
Whiff of paint
Giles Au'ty
As one who cannot share altogether in the excesses of enthusiasm shown by my professional colleagues for the concrete cast made recently by an artist on this year's Turner Prize short list of the whole inside of a house, I must confess nonethe- less to a long-term and continuing addic- tion to oil paint.
The smells of artists' studios excited me greatly even as a small boy. In spite of the claims made for a variety of weird and wonderful media employed by conceptual- ists and such, I continue to think that any- thing worth saying about the human condition can be said superbly still through the traditional means of painted surfaces. What paint did once for Velazquez, Ver-
meer or Van Gogh, it can still do for you — providing you are a genius, of course.
Few painters in the history of art have aspired to such an absolute condition, but what reliance on a traditional medium can do is place an artist accurately somewhere within a traditional hierarchy. Painters of worth are acutely aware of the achieve- ments of their fellows made throughout the long history of art. This week a variety of painters of worth show us what they have been doing in the preceding months or years within the confines of their studios. Some will be noticed widely — Howard Hodgkin, recipient of the contradictory honours of Turner Prize and knighthood, for instance — while others will be ignored almost certainly, except in this column.
The artist I begin with, Ray Atkins, at Michael Richardson Contemporary Art (84 St Peter's Street, Ni) is in his early fifties and remains much too little known and appreciated in view of his talents and the ambition of his work. The paintings in the present show include eight-foot composi- tions as well as much smaller works. Their subject is not obscure personal memory, feeling or desire but the palpable and pre- sent experience of being — in the open air in West Cornwall, sometimes in oddly poignant industrial landscape. This is head- on painting of a most demanding kind, full of freshness, vigour and authenticity. Bring such a painting into your house and it will exude honesty and clean air. As a former resident of West Cornwall, I can almost smell the gorse; here is painting about per- sonal experiences in which all can share.
Sir Howard Hodgkin at Anthony d'Offay (9, 21 and 23 Dering Street, WI) is hardly in need of my eulogies even if I were pre- pared to grant them unconditionally. His show of paintings fills all three galleries of 'Gorse VII', 1992, oil on board, by Ray Atkins the d'Offay empire, ranging in size from the small to the over-ambitious. Hodgkin's paintings are intensely personal, yet vague and ambiguous in form. They look 'mod- ern' and very casual, making reference occasionally to the directly physical or per- ceptual — 'Reading in Bed', 'Sunset' etc — in their broad sweeps of loosely applied paint. What they are really about is feeling, sensation and a refined painterly intuition.
At their best, which generally means smallest, they aspire to a condition of the exquisite: the definitive, one-line poem in paint. The artist paints on framed panels and makes no distinction between frame and support. This may seem a gimmick to many, yet conventional framing would not suit works of this kind at all. Basically, these works seek to be precise, objective equivalents of ephemeral moods, brought on often by places and intimate memories. Sometimes the artist works on them for years before a quiet chime in the cranium tells him they are cooked to a turn: 'I'm finished now, Howard'.
The reservations I have about them relate first to the adequacy of this medium as a vehicle for a sufficient variety of thought: there is acute danger of the whole thing becoming over-personal and cosy. My second cavil is that they rely too much on painterly accident and too little on con- scious control. In fact, this is my precise objection to a great deal of surrealist art and I admit here to a greater interest in the output of the conscious than of the subcon- scious mind. Hodgkin's art attempts to ele- vate the purely personal some rungs too high; his audience of admirers tends also to be typical of a 'me' age.
By contrast, the paintings of Leonard McComb at Browse & Darby (19 Cork Street, W1) are hymns to the external world. If you miss every other show this year, contrive somehow to go to this, for it will reward you deeply. Here is a feast of rich, baroque and wonderfully idiosyncratic painting by an artist who ought to be a household name. Indeed, if he shared an artist like Hockney's facility for self- promotion he surely would be; but then these paintings would not be the products of a modest but unusually original mind. Still-lifes, portraits and landscapes throb with mysterious life. Not all the paintings are realised with total success, yet there is so much ambition and poetry here that foibles can be forgiven. Such painting heartens and enriches and stands the test not only of our own brief moment but com- parisons which can be made from periods when painting was regarded rightly as one of the pinnacles of human achievement.
In conclusion, a visit to the modest and low-key paintings of Israeli artist Ra'anan Levy at Crane Kalman (178 Brompton Road, SW3) is also recommended. Levy tackles the ageless and intractable prob- lems of painting the palpable with com- mendable resolution. I hope he will visit us again.
Previous page
