Eminence grise at Edinburgh ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Imagine three very large, plain, grey paintings: the biggest, in the centre, some nine feet square, the two flanking canvases both seven feet by ten. Although the paintings are well spaced, an immediate impression of a somewhat solemn alignment has to be discounted: we are not confronted by a triptych with religious or hierarchical undertones. Three separate paint- ings face us in physical isolation; their only links being juxtaposition, similarity in shape, and the severity of their common greyness, which is dense and unbroken right across each surface. You see them with maximum objec- tivity in the prosaic, somewhat cold, but accu- rate conditions of plain daylight, modified and slightly softened by a muslin ceiling built across the top windows of the room, so that the paint- ings hang in a faintly underwater glow of cool and even light.
After a while, it is clear that the three paint- ings are all a slightly different colour: the grey adjusts itself as the eye becomes conditioned and the painting on the left is revealed as a warm rose-grey; the central square painting a wholly neutral, untinted, french or dove grey and a fraction lighter than the warmer painting to its left or the colder, slightly greenish-grey canvas to its right. All three are enlivened by sparse pale lines, of varying lengths, but all, evenly, about half an inch thick. The final dis- covery is that there are correspondences be- tween the lengths of the lines at the top and base, for example, or at the sides, of the paint- ings. Coming to life and presenting highly in- triguing puzzles to the eye the longer you stare at them, these paintings yield the basic informa- tion outlined here in just about the same period of time as it has taken you to read so far. There are no side-tracks: the surfaces are even and anonymous, the grain of the canvas is con- cealed and, if there's no staining, there's no impasto either. The surface is like coloured Whatman paper.
It is at this stage, when the eye really begins to work, to probe the secrets of these muted and powerfully restrained paintings—for they give out a sense of imminent revelation and of withholding, tantalisingly near the surface, mysterious insights into some new and unfore- seen record of human activity—it is now that the paintings begin to take over the reflexes of the imagination as well as the eye. For these lines sometimes nearly touch the extremities of the canvas, sometimes float inside, in one case they give the sensation of moving, drifting, from right to left because they are all nearer the left- hand side than the right; many 'corresponding' lines are found to be unequal; all the lines are in varying degree coloured: that is, sometimes a warm white, sometimes cold, occasionally an explicit blue-white or pink-white. They set up a dialogue with each other and very quickly become as concentrated and meaningful as the sound bleeps on some slowly moving tape of new music, made with totally unfamiliar means.
The titles of the three paintings are, in each case, Alap, which refers to the unrhythmic, random and improvisatory sequence in an Indian raga, before the drumming begins and the rhythmic progressions assert themselves. The artist is Yves Gaucher, a thirty-four year
old French-Canadian from Montreal who, with a systematically programmed series of paintings, each with the unmistakable final imprint of a lyrical and radiant imagination, is making what are possibly the most beautiful and original— and awe-inspiring—paintings I've seen any- where since the advent of the Pollock and Rothko.
These paintings are the most powerful ex- hibit in a very good, energetic, splendidly selec- ted survey of current Canadian paintings at Edinburgh entitled Canada 101. You'll find the show at the College of Art, well set out and installed and, if the exhibition as a whole is thoroughly rewarding—and something of a his- torical occasion in itself—the Gauchers make the journey quite imperative. This dazzling artist, whose paintings always look as if they had somehow reached their present condition by remote control or a magician's wand, has recently made a superb group of prints entitled Homage to Webern; these and other prints and a large group of paintings covering the past five years or so, will be seen in strength—and isola- tion—at Whitechapel next February.
The Edinburgh show has the merits of variety and suitable scale; and the Canada Council, in making the selection, has had the confidence to send quite a number of very young artists who are barely established in their own country. No show could be fully representative, but this one is up-to-date, and Bodo Pfeifer, Michael Morris, Gary Lee Nova, Greg Curnoe and others come out of it well. And so, most notably, does the one figurative artist, Claude Breeze, a Van- couver painter whose work deals in violence, imaginatively but unequivocally, with singular originality and power. A large painting of two lynched negroes hanging slumped from a tree beneath leaping flames, with a great swirling landscape hurtling away into space, haunts the memory. The earlier ghost of Bacon has been laid, and Mr Breeze emerges as his own, dis- turbing, man. The rest of the show can roughly be categorised as fanciful hard-edge, a kind of pop-art with immaculate surfaces, or soft-stain abstraction—pace Kenneth Lockhead, shown to great advantage, and Jack Bush, shown cheer- fully but a fraction too arbitrarily so far as the resolution in the work is concerned.
Apart from Gaucher, the two most mature and independent artists are Kiyooka, a Japanese-Canadian painter, and Guido Moli- nari, seen at this year's Venice Biennale. Kiyooka makes an art of incomparable depth and serenity with rich colour, oval shapes and boundary lines not unlike those in Japanese architecture; Molinari is working inexorably in vertical stripes, of varying thickness from canvas to canvas. These artists will be seen later in London; in the meantime, great credit is due to Richard Demarco for instigating the exhibition at Edinburgh, and to the Canada Council for responding so handsomely to the overtures of this energetic Scottish impresario.
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