Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Watters' new gallery a work of art THE new premises for the Waters tecturally the best in Sydney. The address is 109 Riley Street. oft William Street, a few yards from Bennie's. and like most other gal- leries It is a conversion. The Kaman Gallery, though finely detailed, remains a corridor space. The Bonython is an enjoyable hid- den oasis, but it also is a series of corridor spaces. Central Street, the best till now, used a dramatic exist- ing space, but it does not connect with Its upstairs. The new Walters. by Don Gaz- zard, LS unique in that it has a number of spaces that can be ex- perienced separately. Thus works of art can be separated into compan- ionable groups and need neither compete with other nor become monotonous as in the long single - line Installations we usually see. LARTER Richard Larter's Inaugural show at Wafters doesn't need the new spaces it just wants all that extra wall. It's an enormous six -year cornucopia of sex and politics. He's a brilliant draughtsman (he can point with a hypodermic), his color can blast out of the wall. But its his subject matter which is unieque. and his affiliation with Pop Art which never caught on in Australia (he brought his with him, from Englandi. Nearly all his imagery Is ready made, from pictorial printed matter. He makes a jolly mixture of the lop people - politicians, sex -queens, entertainers are all the same to newspapers, TV and to him, so Gor- ton, L.B.J., Mao, Faithful' are all promiscuously together in his pic- tures. Thai':; life. As experienced from the mass media. He presents all these heroes/ villains with extraordinary connois- seurship of the reproduction media's look. Here is TV. here cheap news- print, cheap color, expensive color, or cinema. I find his connoisseurship of visual matter and his fondness for sex and politics very like the world of the great French film maker, Jean-Lue Goddard. DAVID WIRE David Wire, at Central Street, was born 1934 in England, came to Aus- tralia two years ago, lives in Mel- bourne. It is apparently his first one-man show; it is very good and amazingly low-priced for good art- $150 to $200. There are 14 "RetroflectIons." which are reliefs of smallish lozeng- Gallery are archi- ART with Daniel jhomas es or teardr,ps of painted mirror on backgrounds of what might be ',aloud mirror on backgrounds of what might be painted cement, as if on walls of busy public buildings. And, more recent and better, there are 12 'Square Gaines," which are painted mirrors with no back- grounds. The configurations are. in fact, the unpainted portions of the mir- ror, and they are usually bands of wavy parallels. though sometimes they are straight. There are frank references to the jazz-modern ornament of 1930s architectural decoration. The "fountain" and the "water- fall" conventions are there, and "streamlining." and archeological finds from the age of silver - that is the age of black and white movies. Busby Berkeley, and mirrored walls. I think the 30s stuff is there simply because his painting on mir- rors, so why not start with a refer- ence to the only mirror art that still has some common currency (who's been to admire the Austra- lian Hotel's extravaganza entrance from Martin Place lately? The best mirror art in Australia. it's prob- ably for demolition soon). But the exciting tiring about this art is the casually simple way he's .achieved one of the great dreams of contemporary art -release from the object, disembodiment of image. Without laser beams or holograms or tinted steam or inflations he's done it. The narrower bands work best as "intangible drawing." for in the broad ones you can begin to read the reflections. There are kinetic fringe -benefits in the edging of each band with the reflection of the underside of the surrounding paint surface. This is accentuated by occasional incon- spicuous additions of a second com- plementary color at some edges. But the it,rinclpal effect is the miracle of d mbodied lines hover- ing in a singe color ground. 13 Pi 19E9 "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. PETER CLARKE Peter Oarke, a one-man show at Gallery of about 20 luxuriously er*.rtutets canvases, mostly in one color, mostly close to White. The extremely beautiful surface texture comes from using marble dust, and I think Tapies uses it, too. Clarke has a catalogue statement about his allusions to the "white, silent spaces of sung pots" and. to "Melville's great principle of W)t," so although I thought they Molted rather marvellous by electricity I realise I should have seen them in daylight. If I got more sense of sur- face than space, I also enjoyed the very subtle variations between grey - white, pink -white, yellow -white. The pictures are mostly structured to imply fold-overs and hinges (en- velopes, swing -doors, the back of a stretched canvass and it is these devices as well as the colors, that bring the sense 01 space to life, ROBERT JACKS Robert Jacks, at Chine Galleries, shows three large paintings, some small ones, and some watercolors, done before he left Melbourne for Canada last year. One was in "The Field" exhibition, They are rigorously modular paintings of repeated rectangles, bus each unit is edged with a shiftlia. illusionist border made of a sim e tone seal. Sometimes a unit has raw canvas breathing at its centre. The minimal watercolors ($100) are extraordinarily delicate. So per- haps in all good thought -minded artists there's a dreamy romantic fighting for attention. Here the bal- ance seems especially nice, MACQUARIE A mixed show of about 30 figura- tive paintings. Including unfamiliar nudes under willows by Gruner. A rockface by Rees. A Devitt Connor looking like Michael Emit, Among the Wakelins a bright, jazzy "Iron Rooftops' of 1025, Flowers by David Strachan, interiors by Grace Cros- singtort Smith, two artists with whom It's difficult for me to find fault.