Painters show true colours

By T.J. McNAMARA

One of the biggest challenges facing painters is colour. Few painters are natural colorists. The answer post-modern painters find is to concentrate on signs, quotations and irony and bypass the matter altogether.

Such a painter is Tony de Lautour at the Ivan Antony Gallery. His work is almost entirely in black and white. He has gained quite a following with his drawing/paintings of demons and suchlike.

There are some of these in this show, little drawings of snake-handlers, demonic, instinctive figures grappling with raw menace which have more than a touch of the adolescent doodle about them.

Artists such as Alexis Hunter have symbolised instinctive drives similarly but much more effectively.

A couple of crude, decapitated torsos adorned with tattoos are equally feeble but his big paintings and screen-prints are a different matter altogether. They are images with carrying-power.

Years ago Robert Ellis created a whole series of splendid paintings that contrasted the natural power of the land with the surveyors' calculations and geometry that defined it.

De Lautour's paintings also use a mountainous landscape counterpointed by figures like those used by map-makers or those calculating targets for bombers. Also, the stylised hills are shaped into a sign.

The result is not splendid, dry, ironic or tough but undeniably powerful.

The strongest work, Target, consists of ranges of hills painted in white on a black background. They are arranged as a centre and three rings. Around the edges of each form are a variety of figures. The implication is that the raw and empty landscape, a colonial landscape perhaps, becomes the object of desire, aim or punishment. The hills themselves are so bleak and bare that the relevance to current events is immediate, though not perhaps intended at the time of painting.

An equally large work, Copyright, where there is a C inside an O, is a similarly bold way of putting a sign on the land. The silk-screened work New World, which is an apple with a bite out of it in white on black, and Badlands, which is identical but black on white, are raw, even crude, but strong with the possibility of layers of metaphor.

Elsewhere, the fashionable manner of posing emblems against a dark background offers some intriguing detail but is stutteringly incoherent.

De Lautour has had a good deal of recognition in his short career and his talent is undeniable but the full expression of his ideas lies in the future.

The blazing group show at the Anna Bibby Gallery offers a totally different approach to colour. Several of the artists appeared in the Bright Paradise triennial and this exhibition is brighter than bright.

The colour is not natural but chemical, industrial, brash poster colour. Problems of colour are not so much evaded as trampled on.

Sabina Ott reinforces her colour with textures so thick they become relief. She works in encaustic and the thick wax enables her to mould flowers and to roll colour into little scrolls to stand proud of the ground. Her work combines abstract colour with a lurid realism so her Suddenly Green Became Blue takes off in the lower left corner with some startlingly green brussels sprouts.

Alongside this Judy Darragh has works stamped out of cardboard in vivid colours or assembled sheets where all the forms, circles and ovals, are linked with lines that set everything in movement. The works are, literally, dazzling.

Australian James Morrison uses vivid colour to give his collections of exactly painted objects a surreal quality. The Survivor is a dream of an air-crash where the survivor rides a shark. The Island is a primeval world where a hairy family matches a hairy elephant, while a coelacanth climbs ashore from the ocean. It is a world populated by exotic flowers as in Lucy where a modern face shares a landscape of sinister orchids with sabre-toothed tigers all in vivid colour.

Hendrik Drescher works in inky colour on irregularly shaped pieces of paper shot full of holes. The holes symbolise pressure of all kinds and the figures with maniacal smiles that populate the works are all close to hysteria. Simple, hectic colour and intricate line reinforce the oddity.

The show is completed by two works by Seraphine Pick. One shows a hooded woman brooding over a scene of sacrifice, the other a woman on her knees supported only by a prop to her belly. Both suggest that this artist is coming closer to giving definitive expression to the sexual tension of our society. And here, for once, the colour is sombre and works to establish the brooding mood of the work.