Art
VISUALISE a table with nothing between you and it, nothing behind it but a bare wall. On the table top, raised above the line of sight, a few small bottles and at the right-hand end a telephone. Moving away from the telephone towards the left, bestriding the bottles, is a grey monkey. Visualise another table—a com- mon property in this exhibition. On top is a racing car, not being driven along the surface, but somehow welded to it. These fantasies, which can be seen at the Hanover Gallery, have been invented by Victor Willing, who is also showing portraits and pictures of the female nude; most of them by a variety of devices— accessories or textures, many of them taken from the paintings of Francis Bacon. The more elaborate fantasies, like those I have described, have not the strangeness, the power to disturb, found in the early di Chiricos or in pictures by Delvaux or Balthus, to name three artists chosen at random who arouse responses not easily to be rationalised but which psychology can no doubt explain. Immediately one is set wondering whether a more capable painter could make these objects and personages give an affecting performance, for in fact everything here has the most tenuous reality. There is not one way of making things real; Klee, and Dali occasionally, can make things haunt us, but at the moment Willing works without a consistent or secure method a forming anything, a bottle, a wall or an arm. Sometimes he paints with the naive literalness of someone who has not yet considered whether there is any other way of rendering a monkey, without much distortion of its proportions or outline, than by putting down side by side a series of bold grey strokes suggestive of the animal's coat. The bottles underneath its belly are painted flat as a door, rectangles of a single colour without variation of tone. The drawing and painting of the nudes are similar to that of a reasonably adept art student whose use of tone and colour is still elementary, but who can put the paint on with a certain bravura. In the portrait of a fair-haired woman, given a very temporary strangeness by a band of black separating the shoulders from the edge of the canvas, the painting has the kind of Edwardian slickness we find in de Laszlo, Sargent or Lavery—a broken, cheap technique which must then have seemed the very essence of respectable modernity. The red background of another portrait has the appearance of a scrubbed Venetian picture. The most fruitful kind of artistic accidents are those which occur natur- ally in the course of doing something else, working and deliberate. To trade continually with the accidental is hazardous; to plan acci- dents, to make them happen, is a sort of artistic insincerity—the accidents here look to be of this kind. Altogether the most disturbing thing about this show is not the imagery but the mixture of sophistication and clumsiness, the straining after effect, the consistent triviality of method. The mystery of the objective world is not to be achieved in this opportunist way. Upstairs in the same gallery is the most trivial display of sculpture that I can remember for many years. I should not have thought it pos- sible for one individual to draw upon the example of .Giacometti, Picasso, Lynn Chad- wick, Henry Moore, Sardinian art and the makers of those chubby animals to be won with darts at a fair.
Bryan Wynter's new exhibition at the Redfern Gallery is a disappointment. His pictures are again small water-colours and gouaches of Cornwall with its harbours, rocks and churches, some of them in terms of that romantic version of cubism familiar from past shows, others more abstract and symbolic, though similarly rooted in a genuine and sensitive experience of landscape. The latter works show a develop- ment in form and colour beyond the limits of the earlier kind, perhaps because Wynter has not been tempted to exploit his very real dex- terity in making elegant and suggestive textures. But as the forms are strengthened, as the colour becomes more eloquent, a scale of 120 square inches and the use of gouache seems the more inadequate to hold and express the ideas Wynter is presenting. Many of these pictures (Nos. 5, 8, 10, 12, for example) seem to need canvases 30 in. by 40 in. and the firmness and range of oilpaint. That is the reason for dis- appointment, although there are some charm- ing pictures here. The same gallery is also showing a Belgian non-figurative painter, Guillaume Orix, who sets fleets of feeble shapes, some of them reminiscent of Kandin- sky, in any open sea of cottonwoolly paint of a single colour. The colour is gay, but these monotonously similar patterns are absolutely static, for M. Orix does not seem to have the gift of setting the elements of his non-figurative vocabulary into action, either in space or on
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