Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

I i NeXt,- go' 'and see tne several serious one-man shows by local artists. It is a duty (and often a pleasure) in our turn to pay serious attention to them, fur if they choose to work in our midst they are inevitably working for us, and the least we can do is acknowledge them. It's a trouble that one knows them personally. One can't help but see them totally revealed in their work, though I am convinced that when this happens it is a proof of their work's authenticity, even If not necessarily of its excellence. There are Ron Rob- ertson-Swann's paintings at the Rudy Komon Gallery, Guy Warren's at Bon- ython. Guy Warren is the sweetest, nicest, gentlest person imaginable. At first sight his new show of loosely hung, unframed, unstretched canvases, softly stained with subtle, warm, earthy colours - almost no -colour, or the colour of a typically dirty Sydney sky - looks ex- actly that. But then one realises how, for the first time, the paintings are entirely rid of superfluities. He has thrown a lot of rubbish overboard. He has tough- mindedly kept to what are, for him, the essentials - raw canvas, a lovely mat- erial in its own right, so he leaves much of it bare and all of it visible; rectangles, the easiest canvas shape to use, so all his painted forms are roughly rect- angular, too; and the activity of placi.ig fluids on to the canvas, the pro- cess remaining visible - one form visibly grows out of ano=ied.ili,Usory spaces are nfovement changes &motion. To paint at all might be an absurd activity, but to puriWany activity to its essentials Is beautiful. Ron Robertson -Swann, *-On tl alwa intensely, snap unpredic- tably. I sometimes encoun- ter him in the surf at Bondi, playing with his young son. Thus I can't help but see the high colour of the new paintings, their ex- tremely vigorous thrust, and their continually over- lapping layers, as some- thing to do with the glare of on midsummer sae and sea, and with the force of ocean waves, their eternal piling -up. The paintings are ex- hilarating, and one is even titled "Sundance" - vivid opaque colours are poured in shiny rivers on a matt ground; there is not much staining as in his past colour-field paintings. He occasionally uses white, sometimes unsuccessfully. But besides the dance of colour against colour - mauve, yellow, tomato, emerald - and of light catching a shiny surface, of liquid flowing, there still remains, in most works, an underlying struc- ture of opposing diagonals, a loosened version of ear- lier, more contained paint- ings like "Zoom" or "Syd- ney Summer." These liberated paint- ings still hold together, and I think the best, like "Sundance" and "Vertigo," are very good. * * * James Sharp's retro- spective one-man show at the Holdsworth Galleries, if not so stimulating as Warren's or Swann's, is an honourable afair. A sombre cubist in 1950, he became in 1952 a con- structor of abstract colour mosaics, perhaps following Godfrey Miller. Then in the late sixties there were I a r g e -scale, soft -edge colour stains, and now he is into hard-edge with a thought of Ellsworth Kelly. At heart he is, I think, a constructivist. There arc some excellent , collages of magazine illus- I hand, is not . He can worry r Fvs '79 4"/A; ."4'{ ,'r.,"MOiNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. 8 MAR 1973 trations, some etchings and lithographs. * * * Nothing interesting seems to be coming up next week, so I shall again postpone a report on two good mixed shows, sculp- ture at Walters and paint- ings at 38 Hargrave Street. * * * Original prints. There are a lot of prints around Sydney this week. Print exhibitions have quite often been a low-cost way of bringing higher -quality !oreiga, art..to Australia than 6ttiky WI -Brigs an sculptures. For exarcp,o, almost all the boat Contemporary, printmakers in Poland are now at 14 Art Gallery of New SoutheuArales in an exhibition'*bi. lamed by the Print Council of Australia. Poland has a lively tradition of print- making, and conducts, at' Cracow, an important international print bien- nale. And almost all the best contemporary printmakers from Japan are now at the Bonython Gallery in the College Women's Associa- tion c i Japan's seven- teenth annual print show. It is a riot of colour, of Pop Art, and includes a little of traditional Japan. Jorg Schulthess is a Swiss etcher of elegant fantasies. His very fine black and white work is at the Holdsworth Galleries, which, like Bonython, always maintains a good stock of original prints. Two new galleries have opened on the North Shore, intending to special- ise only in original prints. The Print Room, at Cremorne, has a collection of Australian material, in- cluding Lionel Lindsay's graceful wood -engraving of birds. The SoHo Gallery, a Lane Cove, is mostly con cerned with European prints. It has links with the; Reese -Palley Galleries in; the United States. The rector knows his material - the edition sizes, the techniques, the degrees of originality of. say, the works by Dali or Hun- derfwasser. Posters are also stocked. But the best original print on view in Sydney is still the Richard Hamilton at David Jones'; based m. a newspaper photogr-ph, it shows an art dealer in handcuffs. * * * Tapestries, like original prints. come in editions, but are much more ex- pensive to make. They arc, therefore, invariably more conservative. At the Sebert Galleries are tapestries by a contemporary Belgian, Gaspard de Wit. Some make a token gesture to- wards the abstract -ex- pressionism of the recent past others settle more comfortably into the lux- urious look of imitation baroque. * * * Foreigners. I suppose our increasingly numerous ethnic minorities enjoy a hit of nostalgia for their homelands, and even minor works of art can convey the flavour. But the work of immigrant painters often seems poig- nantly isreiessoot to us and to life kg. Sod now in Sydney. .;4,,/,44 Isto, i Who comes from tykt settled in Sydney 1 *Ir. His paint- ings and drawings at the Villiers Gallery nod stylis- tically to de Stael and Picasso and Dubuffet, and why not? They're a good start, but the paintings' temperature and colour is cool, their figures arc generally housebound, the compositions are sparse and uncluttered. All of which is against the grain of our sub -tropical outdoor life in a messily littered environment. A solitary yellow painting has been painted here, so at least he is aware of the problem.