Transfiguration
Guildhall Art Gallery, until 4 October
Transfiguration
Guildhall Art Gallery, until 4 October
Complaining the other day in these pages about the crowded nature of public exhibition spaces in London, I had momentarily forgotten the secret charms of the Guildhall Art Gallery. This museum, specialising in London subjects, receives scant attention in the press, and as a consequence it is less than mobbed by the public. Yet it has mounted a very creditable and popular-scholarly series of exhibitions, being particularly good on Victorian painters of the Frith and Watts type, while also dealing with modern and living artists. The permanent collection contains many treasures, some of which may be seen in the newly published catalogue Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in the City of London (Public Catalogue Foundation, £25 in hardback), as well as a huge collection of works by Matthew Smith (1879–1959), in all subjects and media. There will be an exhibition of Smith’s work later in the year, which I hope to review, but in the meantime, there is Transfiguration.
The subtitle of this show is Our Landscape, Our Art, Our Time, and it was put together by the two young artists whose work it features — Dan Llywelyn Hall (born 1980) and Raphael Pepper (born 1979). It was shown first in the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in Cardiff alongside paintings from that museum (such as the poignant landscapes of James Dickson Innes, one of my long-time favourites) that had inspired Llywelyn Hall and Pepper, together with work by schoolchildren taught by the two artists. In London, the remit has changed slightly: the artists are showing some of their Welsh work but have made new paintings and drawings in response to the Olympic site in East London. The result is a smallish display in the first-floor balcony gallery, but the work is of such quality and interest that it overflows the space and effortlessly colonises the imagination.
Drawing is sometimes rather looked down upon as an inferior or merely preparatory art form when compared with oil painting. Raphael Pepper shows this to be unjust. Drawing is his entire practice, and he raises it at least to the level of good painting in such majestic inventions as ‘Loss, Time, Love’, a vast panorama some ten feet long, executed in coloured pencil. This is the first work to greet the visitor to the show, and its size and impressiveness are unexpected. It’s a transcendent statement worthy of the great Abstract Expressionists, a comment on the sublime akin to Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. It is quite simply two deep blue rectangles, one above the other, divided by a searing and incandescent white horizon line. The top rectangle shades on the right to a deep blue-flecked red which is mirrored to a lesser degree in the lower rectangle. It’s about intensities of light and colour, heat and cold, passion and control. It’s also about duration, since looking at it we cannot escape thinking of the time it took to make, being obsessively worked over in small pencil marks. It’s a remarkable work.
If ‘Loss, Time, Love’ is large enough to fall into and lose yourself, the other paintings and drawings are more intimate in scale, though the best of them are no less punchy. A theme running through the London work seems to be that the Olympics are not such a good thing after all. (And so say all of us.) Llywelyn Hall’s finest picture here is the lyrical landscape ‘Lea Valley Wilderness’, a vortex of natural growth and colour centred around tree forms, a lovely poetic painting. The large canvas next to it, ‘Vision of Gold’, shows what will happen to the countryside — which now looks suitably polluted and stricken — as the Olympic stadium looms over it and dominates all. Already the ancient Greenway that runs near the site is being needlessly bulldozered and ‘cleaned up’. Hall enjoys excursions into Grand Guignol in ‘Onlookers’ and ‘Dreams of Steel and Concrete’, the latter looking like a ship of fools all lit up and sailing to its doom.
Pepper seems to be less emotionally involved with the Olympic subject. His crisp, occasionally stabbing style is reminiscent of the excavated imagery of the woodcut, a process he approaches in ‘The Moment’, a linocut on Japanese paper. His best work sets high standards, and not all his drawings here match the power and colouristic juiciness of ‘Cardiff Docks’, which looks as if it’s on fire after a wartime bombing raid. The worked and reworked surfaces of his drawings crack and buckle sometimes under the strain of repeated scoring, but what an illumination of pink and gold is the reward in this particular work. Both Dan Llywelyn Hall and Raphael Pepper are doing something remarkable in this age of sensationalism and false values. All praise.
At Frost & Reed, 2–4 King Street, St James’s, SW1 (until 30 September), is an exhibition of new paintings by Simon Casson (born 1965). Entitled Between Past and Present, The Thesmophoria Revealed, it is a show of luscious oils that takes figurative mythological painting to new and intriguing heights. Casson is that rare beast, a painter who can command the skills more common to the ateliers of three centuries ago than to today, who yet disrupts his own facility in order to make an image relevant to contemporary society. He unveils a new History Painting, founded on the iconography of the past yet reinterpreted in terms of modern disaffection and confusion, which he somehow manages to make beautiful.
The artist himself admits to the ‘feral atmosphere of abandonment’ he summons up, but the extremes of sensual beauty are not left unchecked. These paintings are far more complicated than simple statements of hedonism. Casson interrupts his visual pleasures with surface intrusions resembling torn paper or skid marks, or he collages other images over his lushly painted fruit and flesh. The Old Mastery subjects are rarely straightforward. The new mixture is altogether more disturbing and emotionally challenging than a simple indulgence in the senses. Casson makes you think and question. Whether the focus of your questioning is pictorial conventions or moral values, both are intimately concerned with the making of good art.
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