Is 'Unbound' at the Hayward Gallery a groundbreaking exhibition or a hotch-potch? Andrew Graham-Dixon on the nouvelle vague
The title, ''Unbound'', suggests dangerous energies unleashed. But the Hayward's new exhibition of contemporary art also comes with a more prosaic subtitle: ''Possibilities in Painting''. This is the sort of phrase which is traditional Arts Council-ese for ''a load of modern pictures which don't have that much in common but which we like and hope you will come and look at''. Doubts are raised at the outset: is this to be a ground-breaking exhibition, or a hotch-potch?
The organisers, Adrian Searle and Greg Hilty, seem to want to have it both ways: to make large claims for the art which they have selected and then, immediately, to take them back. The exhibition sort of, almost, in a way, nearly identifies something like a Zeitgeist in modern art. But it hedges its bets and presents itself merely as a sample of some of the things that some of the painters working now are doing. This is a show that does not quite dare to be daring.
It consists of work by 14 artists of widely differing ages from here, there and everywhere, and it opens with an apparent collision of opposites. Jonathan Lasker, an American painter, paints enormously enlarged scribble-pad doodles which abut and overlap one another on fields of bright colour. The result is like automatist art redone without feeling, re-rendered in thick but deliberately dead paint: spontaneous and child-like arabesques that have been sabotaged, robbed of true spontaneity by the deliberateness with which they have been copied. This is painting which looks exuberant but which is really suspicious of exuberance, and of itself.
On the other wall from Lasker's works hang those of Swiss-born Olivier Mosset, who practises...
