Date: 03-11-1986
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999            
Subject:   20th Century  Now        

The debris of the world examined closely in new work by Jonathan Waller and the Boyle family.

JONATHAN WALLER is an artistic scavenger. He paints mute agglomerations of abandoned machinery, obsolete locomotives; the sad relics of decline that litter the industrial graveyards of Scotland, Wales and the North. Waller's first one-man show in London, which opened at the Paton Gallery on Friday, confirms him as one of the most technically accomplished painters of his generation. The paintings, sketches and studies that make up the exhibition share a common theme, evident in titles like Degeneration or Run-ning Down: the slow paralysis that has crept over Britain's industrial heartland.

Throughout this exhibition, one senses the ghostly presence of Turner's great painting Rain Steam and Speed. If Turner celebrated the new mood of optimism heralded by the advent of the railway, Waller paints elegies to the dead ideals of the Industrial Revolution. Rain, steam and speed became metaphors, in Turner's painting, for the new freedom of vision granted to man by his invention of the railway. Waller's trains, by contrast, are static, comdemned to rust forever in some forgotten cul-de-sac. He was born in 1956, and perhaps the most impressive aspect of his painting is its sheer technical mastery. Waller treats paint almost like a comestible, applying buttery layers of pigment to convey the multi-hued patina of rust, or the rich, creamy clouds of steam that billow across his canvases. He has, also, a magnificent grasp of how to convey sheer weight, the dense and heavy presence of his me¬tallic corpses.

There is great subtlety, too, in the ways in which Waller plays on the anthropomorphic pos-sibilities of his chosen lumps of scrap. Generator, which looks initially like a straightforward ren¬dering of mechanical debris, resolves itself, on further inspection, into a strange sexual encoun¬ter, with its coiling and penetrating valves, pipes and tubes (the effect is heightened by Waller's choice of a traditionally warm, "organic" palette, his deployment of a portraitist's range of fleshtones to paint rusting metal). He may have banished the human figure from his paintings, but they read nevertheless like sombre meta¬phors for human existence — he gradual process of entropie decline that means people, like ma¬chines, must eventually lie down.

Outside London, the Milton Keynes Exhibition Gallery seems an unlikely venue for the eccentric automated sculptures of Sokari Douglas Camp. Sokari's multi-media assemblages were among the most interesting work on display at the Royal College Degree Show earlier this year. Groaning clattering and whirring in Milton Keynes, that soulless combination of open-air carpark and shopping mall, they act as a power¬ful antidote to the town's muzak-accompanied characterlessness. The centrepiece of the instal¬lation, Alali Uru ("Showboat"), is a plywood and steel construction : a blackened dug-out canoe.some twenty-feet long, equipped with oars that clank shudderingly into action at timed in¬tervals. At one end of the boat stands a similarly automated human figure made from ribbons of sheet steel, whose feet stamp in time with the motion of the oars. To one side another work, Excited Women, consists of three crazily gesticu¬lating steel figures; from within one of their hol¬low bodies a car alarm screams insistently.

If all this suggests that we are witnesses to some kind of ritual, the suspicion is confirmed by a videotape running concurrently in a corner of the gallery. Sokari's sculptures refer to the annu¬al celebrations held in her birthplace, Buruma in Nigeria, during which the inhabitants relive, in Sokari's installation is itself a ritualistic re-enact-ment of a remembered ritual. As with the work of many young artists, one is left groping for its meaning, without the presence of a prior oeuvre within which to place it. Tentatively, Sokari's in-stallation seems poised between celebration of her homeland and alienation from it — the dark¬er side of her work is implied in the contrast be-tween her monochromatic, almost theatrically hollow sculptures and the vibrantly colourful photographs of the actual festivities in Buruma that line the gallery walls. It will be interesting to see how her art develops.

Finally worth mentioning is an ambitious and intriguing theme show at Annely Juda/Juda Rowan, "From Figuration to Abstraction." Eclectic in the extreme , the exhibition includes paintings and sculptures by some twenty five art-ists, ranging from the early years of this century to the present day. Each artist is represented by both figurative and abstract work, and thé result is rather like one of those before-and-after com-mercials favoured by manufacturers of soap powder.

Abstraction — certainly in the case of Antho¬ny Reynolds, who is represented by a gloomy fig-urative oil painting and a pristine abstract re¬lief — washes your art whiter than white. This is an exhibition of fascinating contrasts in which abstraction, it has to be said, generally comes off better; Ben Nicholson's 1961 relief, Altamira, with its purged geometries of architectural form, de¬livers an elegant reproof to the squat ungainli-ness of the same artist's conventionally represen¬tative earlier painting, House, Castagnola; Bridget Riley's Pink Landscape I960, with its saccharine transformation of Seurat's pointillist technique, dissolves to nothing next to her reso¬nant abstract of 1984, though both paintings share the same colour scheme. Throughout, the show offers a series of condensed insights into the subtle continuities that run through the work of its selected artists, whether they were working in an abstract or a figurative vein. One com¬plaint, though — we could surely have done without yet more Pcasso, who is virtually omni¬present in London's galleries at the moment. He might be dead, but he still gets around more than any living artist.

New Paintings continues at , 2 Langley Court, London WC2 un¬til 29November;Sokari Douglas Camp: "Alali", at Milton Keynes Exhibition Gallery until 22 November;"From Figuration to Abstraction" at Annely Juda Fine Art/Juda Rowan Gallery, 11 Tot¬tenham Mews, London Wl until 19 December. For othergallery information see Listings pages.