The real thing
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
The best looking exhibition in London at the moment is the recent sculpture by Bryan Kneale at the Redfern Gallery: the work confirms first impressions in its distinction and easy, spare strength. When some of our most severely abstract painters are showing signs of wanting to make their pure, non-representational, flat colour canvases project some hint of an outside reference, toying, for instance, with varying de- grees of illusionistic space (though fighting shy, still, of explicitly figurative references), Kneale's sculpture seems peculiarly relevant. That is, he is as concerned as ever to make abstract sculptures which work on their own terms, but which in some odd way spill outside these terms when it comes to digesting the•nature of the image in each case. This sculpture suggests something other than itself : machinery some- times, or at least a mechanism, equipment or implements of some kind or another. It may seem a rather foolish situation in the evolution of art when these implications become remarkable: why not make a more obviously figurative sculp- ture and have done with it, would be a legiti- mate question. But Kneale has no interest in constructing a fantasy repertoire of tools or gadgets: his abstract awareness is acute and sophisticated, and the underlying expressionism of his work disrupts any functional premise.
As a Manxman, Kneale joins the Celts in the unpredictability and the alternating warmth and harshness of his imagination. Possibly the fact that his brother, Nigel Kneale, wrote The Quatermass Experiment has some bearing as well, on the occasional strangeness of his formal ideas. Whatever the sources of inspiration, the present assembly of rods, discs, spheres, and slats in copper, brass, steel, glass and perspex still retains the suggestiveness I've touched on, though in far more elegant and refined terms than before. These new sculptures gleam and flash with robust delicacy: a bisected sphere reflects one half of itself in the polished surface of an intervening disc; there are several com- ments on the devices proper to illusion; the world of mathematical and scientific instru- ments, or at least something functional, seems to be buried beneath this calm and reflective surface.
The most remarkable achievement rests on the way in which the differing properties of the sculpture are held together, synthesised into a new sculptural idea, and then re-established at another level as separate ingredients. It is only after the initial impact of the sculpture that the identity of the materials is fully disclosed, to be relished for its own sake—and, most impor- tantly, for its colour; whilst the 'instrument' references flicker in and out of one's aware- ness. There are signs that Kneale is actually in- venting new equivalents for earlier elements in his sculpture which, at that time, were in fact ready-made machine parts, re-assembled inside a new whole. The new components are not 'ready-mades' but the artist invests them with a character which seems vaguely recog- nisable, in terms of a technological aesthetic, and then resists identification.
The group of work by young artists, selected by older colleagues, on view at Kasmin's is best passed over in silence: only Durrant and gazler begin to make the grade. Another young artist, Franklin Wilson, is exhibiting for the first time at the Robin Symes Gallery (346 King's Road, Chelsea) and shows every sign of adding to English art a thoroughly authorita- tive, original and disturbing imagination. A mark of this artist's strength is the way in which compulsive (for him) content is exactly matched by recurrent formal obsessions: the exploration is double-sided, inter-dependent, and wholly convincing.
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