ART
Demure walls
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The most exasperating and thoroughly worthwhile event in London now is a demonstration, rather than an exhibition, sponsored by the Institute of Directors, in association with the Royal Academy of Arts and supported by the Arts Council. The end product of all this trustful backing and sponsorship, from such a respectable triumvirate, is a characteristically ingrate and awkward affair entitled, with simplist aplomb, 'Big Paintings for Public Places'. In the words of Sir William Emrys Williams, General Adviser to the Institute of Directors Arts Advisory Council: •. . . sixteen artists . . . were given the freedom of seven rooms in the Royal Academy's main galleries. Each painting is designed to take into account the requirements of a particular space of the gallery walls and in nearly every case this space was the first choice of the artist himself . . . the paintings you see here are movable murals which the artist can use to enrich otherwise empty walls, with a vivacious challenge to the passer-by.'
Some of these colossal canvases, belliger- ently timid and dull as they are, look rather like the vivacious challenge of a sailor's farewell to the notion of enrichment, but there are compensations. These are young artists after all, mainly fresh from art school and still bound by absolute conformity to the prevailing orthodoxies of large scale abstract painting. One hopes for further instalments of broader range and with weightier entries. Most of the work on display is too near third-year student level, and not best calculated to win the heart or mist the eye of any industrialist or property developer.
Two works by two young artists, how- ever, float in the centre of the show, sharing a room with the apparently neutral but lethal impact of a tumbler of gin in a christening font. The first sight of their wicked invention comes when you turn right from the main entrance gallery: through the wide doorway leading into the next room is a narrow horizontal band of spiked coffee colour, placed rather low on the far wall and serving as a spatial barrier, laterally, across the doorway. As you walk through, this band of colour widens so outrageously that your span of vision cannot encompass its extremities. By swivelling your head, as if at a tennis match, you learn precious little except that the far, very far, right end is squared off and the equally distant left hand end is curved. Movement is thus implied from right to left, but by nothing so crude as an arrow shape or action: the effect is comparable, by contrast, to a friendly directional nudge from a blunt instrument.
This pure, spare painting, of deadly cunning, measures fourteen inches in height by 432 inches in length, projecting from the wall by two inches. It is called J. C. Chester- man 1, for what must undoubtedly be precise reasons, and the artist, aged twenty- eight, is Peter Waldron. Nearby, his other work, J. C. Chesterman II, measuring 151 inches in height by fourteen in width, also projects two inches from the wall but shoots up vertically at quite a speed since its colour is a luminous egg-yolk yellow. The base of this one is squared off, the top is curved.
Mr Waldron's room mate, John Murphy, is younger at twenty-three, but more than his match in these disarming subtleties. 11.7.69 is a big rectangular canvas painted an even matt ivory-cream, all over. A second and larger rectangular painting is a matt, even, pinkish orange-brown colour, all over. The execution of all four works is impec- cable (`it better be', as Stravinsky said on landing in Miami, where he had an engage- ment, and learning from his reassuring friend, Mr Craft, that it was indeed Miami), and their ensemble strikes a contemplative chord. John Murphy is working at St Katharine's Dock. Both artists should receive vast bursaries at once, and every kind of commission: reactions of such steely intelligence to the terms of space and scale demand reward. Their wholly unpretentious paintings are also beautiful. There is not less in this than meets the eye, but much, much more.
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