Spiritual dimension

The human eye is an amazing mechanism, but its vision is limited. We can’t see behind us, we can’t see much to the side, and in front — unless we’re desert tribesmen or Eskimos — our view is almost always obstructed by something. So some of what we see is actually ‘seen’, the rest is extrapolated from experience. Plus, our view from any one point — between those rocks, beyond that gateway, through those trees — exists only in that one spot at that one time. Move forward, back, to the side and it changes; wait for the light to alter and it’s further transformed.

These are not questions that bother most of us as we hurtle blindly from one view to another, but they bother painters whose professional business is to extrapolate 2-D imagery from visual experience. They have occupied Paul Feiler all his working life, and he has formulated some intriguing answers.

As a young abstract painter in Cornwall in the 1950s, Feiler wrestled with the pictorial problems posed by Homo erectus’s paradoxical habit of standing vertically while scanning horizontally. His first solutions were gestural abstractions in which elements of the landscape — cliffs, tree trunks, boulders — floated in a creamy space while apparently still attached to the ground. Then a science writer showed him a little girder he had picked up on the Apollo II launch site, and asked him to paint a picture of the moon. So began a series of explorations of space with a capital ‘S’ that led Feiler to the pure geometric abstractions which form the climax of his mini-retrospective, The Near and The Far, at Tate St Ives and the subject of his recent show, Janicon, at the Redfern Gallery.