Wastecoast
ART PAUL GRINKE
The West Coast remains an alien culture I'm afraid. But as the fabled Mr Hirschorn has recently voted its capital city number two in the international art entrepot stakes, we must surely make some effort to grasp it. My own comprehension is limited to a vocabulary gleaned from studious attention to Beachboy records, and newspaper reports which make it sound like a hipster's Xanadu under perman- ent seige. Joe Goode's exhibition at the Rowan Gallery may help us arrive at the nirvana which must be the preferred state of all aspir- ant Westcoasters.
Joe Goode's paintings are so cool as to be almost in a state of suspended animation: large, grey and cold with the unrelieved motif of tumbler and spoon placed at strategic corners of the canvas. One's first thought is of Morandi, the master of the still life, par excellence, after Cezanne, but Joe Goode is on a different tack. These paintings are outside the European tradi- tion and equally removed from anything that is going on in New York. They are an indi- genous Los Angeles product on parallel lines to the assemblages of Berman, Hopper, Con- ner and Bell, with the same relentless explora- tion of mundane imagery. Tumblers and spoons do not come into the same category as most well-tried still life subjects like apples, bottles and flowers. They are in a different class of object: too neutral, commonplace and unpre- possessing to be considered. Joe Goode's exhibition of sculptured stairs complete with carpets, in Los Angeles, shows a preoccupa- tion with the kind of objects which don't evoke even a flicker of nostalgia. His titling of the whole series as English Still Life on White Tablecloth shows some awareness of the joke.
The brushwork itself is completely astrin- gent, more of a sketchy indication than a realisation in paint. It would have been pleas- ant if this rather aridly thematic show had been relieved by some of Joe Goode's other work, such as the stairs. On the strength of these one .11 left with the impression of Los Angeles as a Viastaland of visual puns.
Patrick Heron is the master of the blinding flash with a pulsating range of hot colours Which stand out from their surroundings like the sun peeping out of a. cloud. His exhibition at the Waddington Gallery holds no great sur- prises but one can still bask in the warmth of paintings which are alive and kicking. For Heron the simple formal shapes he uses to divide the canvas are merely a framework to prevent colour spilling over into the next. The precarious balance which one area enjoys in relation to its neighbour is the essence of his command of paint.
Sad as it is to nail the lid down on an old friend one must admit that surrealism is a spent force. The deathly pointlessness of the little magazines which still appear in France and Belgium chewing over ideas which would have been vaguely novel thirty years ago has a visual counterpart in the paintings of Leonor Fini at the Hanover Gallery. Her drawing is impeccable, the application of paint faultless, the colour as sharp as acid drops, but the paint- ings are like fairy stories written by a dedicated rapist. Each shows an episode in a kind of les-
bian Arabian Nights, with the same eternity of silence and inaction that Magritte could put into
an empty room or a desolate forest. Tough willowy girls starkly clad in enormous flowered hats stare relentlessly at each other or out of the canvas, betraying not the smallest quiver of emotion.
Titillating certainly but not the least bit satisfying, which is perhaps a suitable
epitaph for surrealism. The rot really sets in with the wholesale pillage of Viennese Seces- sion painting. Tiffany glass dots the foreground as if expected to create the same frisson as the reputed glass of absinthe in Beardsley's Waiting.
One or two of the standing nudes are so blat- antly pastiches of Klimt as to be painfully
embarrassing, and the watercolour portraits of belle époque girls are like Helleu prints left for too long under the acid.
The only redeeming feature is the cold im- placability of her technique. It may be unfash- ionable to 'burn with a hard gemlike flame' but, if staid, donnish, cavalry-moustached Walter Pater could get away with it, then Ldonor Fini should find no difficulty.
Previous page
