Art
Bright star
John McEwen Lawrence Preece's latest watercolours and acrylics (Redfern till 1 December) further advance his exploration of space. By various devices he creates vast distances and monumental scale. They are sculptural paintings. "fact it is invariably through contrasting a sculptural or architectural fantasy with a
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conventional landscape that he succeeds n d.isturbing the viewer's spatial preconceptions. This may sound tricksy or even a bit science fictional and at times it knowingly is, but it would be a very superficial observer who disregarded the deeper implications of such Puzzles in relation to art in general. All 4.rt• for instance, is dependent on the leer's reconstitution of what he senses. To snmeone unversed in the particular code by which we understand even the simplest r,ePresentational object things become mean gless: desert tribesmen shown TV for the rst time could not .understand what the Inages were—camels simply are not grey and a few inches tall. And similarly, without our readiness to collude in its deception, ebven the 'The Flagellation' by Piero della rrancesca would become no more than a
surface pattern of colours. Preece parodies and emphasises the famous perspective of that picture, and our own observation of it, by abstracting its figures and casting it off into real—outer—space as a floating geometric object.
Of course most painting is to do with this one problem, of creating the illusion of a third dimension. In the 'sixties some artists, frustrated by what they considered to be the limitations of conventional painting and sculpture, tried to express visual perception in other ways. They would create an object in the landscape, document its existence and then present the documentation as a work of art. The viewer had to reconstitute what he saw in just the same way as if he had been looking at an Annigoni, the only difference being in effort not in kind. In his monochrome 10 • 8 watercolours Preece parodies such photographic documentation as well, wittily demonstrating that a conceptual impact is far more easily achieved in a modest picture than by all the shenanigans of going to Peru or running a hundred-mile fence through California. It is a neat reinstatement of painting, significantly different in its purpose from the superficially similar sketches by Oldenburg proposing humorous monuments for wildly improbable sites. But this is only one aspect. However witty or associative his pictures may be, Preece's central concern is always to express the sculptural properties inherent in visual understanding. The unreality of mono
chrome colour lends weight to ambiguity, 'unrearjrnagery enforces our understanding of reality: hedgerows lift into the sky from the. similitude into the reality of a net, a river of a ribbon; a cube is cut from the sea. His pictures may use surrealistic conventions or have dream associations but their innermost purpose is always to emphasise space by displacing its parts. Having said that, it must be stressed that the richness of its association and the skill of the paintwork, added to this unifying central purpose, is what gives these paintings their special distinction.
Preece is one of the few artists in any medium whose ideas about space take into account our unique understanding of it in a post-astronaut world. Some oft he paintings. like the parody of Piero already mentioned, take the spatiality of Space as their setting. In one instance twelve small pictures are banked like an information panel of TV sets, the totality of their imagery screened in a large painting opposite: dynamic objects being cast off into Space, their movement set against the whirling traces of stars; an example of space conveyed through movement, which is the theme of several of the other paintings in the show. Movement has not often been described in paint, and if Preece is not always successful the attempt itself is praiseworthy. But it is the beauty of so many of these pictures as pieces of painting, in most instances the stone-grey watercolours even more than the larger acrylics. that finally seals their achievement.
This exhibition promotes Preece to the front rank of English painters working today, and is undoubtedly the most interesting by a younger artist to have appeared this year—all the more welcome for being spiced with the wit of the impossibly unbending rods in No. 44, or the humour of that picture of spinning cast-off objects referred to above: 'Uh. Uh. Hullo Houston.'
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