Dominic is
a lecturer in Fine Art at AUB and a practising artist who shows with Charlie
Smith Gallery in London.
GROUP 7
Exhibition at L’Artishe Gallery Swanage
‘Pure
drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in
nature is coloured.’
Paul Cezanne
Cezanne
rolled out the path of modernism, releasing colour and form from depiction and
heralding a truth to material. This simplicity is found in work of Group 7,
here is proof, as is evident in the renewed interest in abstraction within
contemporary painting, that new forms are to be found in the fundamentals of
the language of paint. There is a ‘material’ suspension in these works, where
trees, grids or squares become loaded with an intrinsic being, a near
existential joy, think Cezanne’s apples.
There is no
room for irony here, these are seekers after a truth, indeed Brian Bishop’s
perfectly rendered ‘squares’ declaim their reality, scumbled marks break out
from beneath, paint drips off the cut cloth edge. This search maybe begins with
the inchoate drawings of Mike Griffiths, where the potential of what’s not
there, absence, lends them formal power, to end with Pete Symons’s film, quite
simply light on nature, an end that is really a beginning.
Bonnie
Brown’s work ripples with this very light, nature as the intangible floats to
the surface, while in Martyn Brewster’s prints colour dips and quivers, a
seismic reflection sinking into dark depths. Although there are nods to
landscape in the paintings of Ursula Leach, it is not until we come to Fran
Donovan and Symons’s work that nature becomes explicit, but it is a nature
subsumed to a material formalism of the painters’ language.
Indeed in
Leach’s work the colourfields rise up, literally floating off the surface of
the canvas.
Colour and
form, these are intrinsic to the painter, printmaker and draughtsman. These
artists grapple with the intrinsic, what is evident here is the more you seek
the truth, the bigger the questions become.
Dominic
Shepherd
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