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Friday 18 July 2008

Take your pick

Robert Dukes (born 1965) is one of our finest younger artists.

Robert Dukes (born 1965) is one of our finest younger artists. Now enjoying his second solo show with Browse & Darby (19 Cork Street, W1, until 2 May), this painter in the great tradition of European realist art proves that he can deliver the goods while continuing to break new ground. The chief joy of his exhibition is the lucid and succinct colour. Just look at the run of still-life paintings down the right-hand wall of the gallery as you enter. In front of you is the delicious ‘Pink Rose’, sensual and particular, and then comes a whole cornucopia of individually painted fruit. Here are paintings of startling originality and succulent paintwork: ‘Small Green Lemon’, ‘Red Grapefruit’, ‘Two Satsumas’, ‘Cadmium Lemon’, ‘Orange on a Shaving Mirror’ and ‘Lime Study’. But Dukes doesn’t only paint fruit. Among the other subjects on show are portraits, a pair of scissors and a langoustine. These paintings look wonderfully fresh, with a sense of the inevitable to balance their spontaneity. So it’s important to be reminded just how difficult they are to make, as Dukes informed us in his wry ‘Diary of a Painter’ in last month’s Galleries magazine.

It’s so good to find an artist who knows and loves the great tradition of painting, and who doesn’t think — like so many conceptual artists — that they’ve just invented the wheel. Dukes’s fruitful dialogue with the Old Masters is evident here in the marvellous painting ‘A Church in Naples, after Thomas Jones’, and in such delights as his painted studies after Rembrandt. There’s also a whole tranche of modestly priced drawings (after Morandi, Goya, Veronese, Degas et al.), mostly hanging in the downstairs gallery. This is a lovely show, and particularly impressive in the way Dukes makes his subjects glow with inner life. For someone who paints still-life with such devotion, he manages to imbue his paintings with a remarkable degree of movement.

At Marlborough Fine Art (6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 26 April) is a Centenary Exhibition in celebration of that pioneer of British Modernism, Victor Pasmore (1908–98). Consisting of large paintings and much smaller prints all done in the 1990s, the show reminds us of Pasmore’s strengths as a colourist and draughtsman, mostly in the exploration of abstract yet organic form. (I hear good reports of the newly hung Pasmore room at Tate Britain, which offers a wider chronological range of his work.) Towards the end of his life, Pasmore began experimenting with the reintroduction of figurative imagery into his resolutely abstract compositions. So in some of the paintings here we see the outlines of birds and plants and even the suggestion of people. But the most powerful pictures are the abstract distillations of form, in oil and spray paint and pencil on board, such as the very last painting here, ‘Untitled’ of 1997. It is simply made from rounded shapes of a lambent duck-egg blue, with some pencil overdrawing and a couple of black elements edging in from the left. Immensely poised and satisfying.

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