Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Light and shade

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 12 October

David Tress: Chasing Sublime Light
Petworth House, West Sussex, until 29 July

If he’s widely known for anything, it’s for the beauty of his draughtsmanship and Self is regularly praised for his technique. This infuriates him. He calls it ‘overloving’ and is more interested in using his technical dexterity as an instrument of satire. He speaks of ‘fostering’ his art, allowing its meanings to develop, often through the strategy of isolating a thing from its context. Look at the cinema drawings, the woman on a bar stool eating a double cheeseburger, or her sister on a slimming machine, or ‘Margaret on a Sofa’. No one draws like Colin Self, with such dense shiny blacks cunningly lightened with coloured pencil. The Pop art sexiness is deliberately tempered by a depth-charge of 18th-century earthiness recalling the satire of Gillray. What could be easy on the eye becomes increasingly challenging.

In the second room, a charred nuclear victim lies in the middle of the floor, mutilated while sunbathing, and there are drawings of Hiroshima victims on the walls, along with vicious guard dogs on missile bases. The overlap between man and machine recalls Vorticism with a Sixties make-over, and Self’s technical range, whether printmaking, drawing or sculpture, is impressive. The final room edges into a world of private humour and fantasy but pursues the machine/man aesthetic with a return to pastoral themes. A group of six watercolours of Scotland are surprising in their delicacy and atmospheric rigour. There’s also a commercial gallery show of his Sixties work in London at Delaye/Saltoun, 11 Savile Row, London W1 (until 2 August), featuring a range of typical imagery. Worth seeing, but not as an alternative to Chichester. Although the variousness of Self’s work can be bewildering, the Pallant House show is a must.