Spin-doctoring in paint

By T.J. McNAMARA

Nothing these days is quite what it seems. In art, as in politics, everything has a spin: a twist, a turn, a subversive angle.

Dick Frizzell, who has a show at the Gow Langsford Gallery until November 30, is an old hand at spin-doctoring. His show is called Pleased to Remember and the spin is double-barrelled nostalgia.

He is looking back to a period of abstraction in Europe and also looking back at his own interest in such work, because he has been sitting on these canvases since 1994. Only a couple are recent.

The paintings are stunningly clever. They take the style of the second generation of abstractionists, such as Miro or Arp, and play witty, visually intelligent games with it.

Link contains a number of circles linked with a zinging line that pulls them all in a dance in the foreground except for one red dot which lingers in the background, glowing and distant because it does not share the line.

Another painting, Chromarama, is made up of 16 panels, all with variations of circles in chiming colour. Generally it is line that energises everything. It can be looping, as in Lost in Space, or it can rocket about in straight lines as in Big Parade, which is two panels connected by twin systems of lines, a black and a white. Both cannon around in a continuum that irresistibly and irrepressibly draws the eye into a dance.

Authority in painting surfaces is characteristic of all these paintings. This masterly handling is most marked in Venus Reductio, done this year. In the middle of the canvas is a mechanical Venus in the manner of Picabia. She is flanked on one side by three hovering circles and, on the other, by a space with rectangular planes interacting. The whole thing is linked by the zooming lines of Venus' attractions and in the left corner is a little pinging circle of red and black which lifts the composition.

Frizzell's work is a juggling circus act. It takes great skill to keep all those balls in the air and we certainly admire the performance, though it is a bit lightweight.

Another highly accomplished artist putting a spin on things is next door at the John Leech Gallery, where Raymond Ching has a show called Measured Drawings, also until November 30.

He has come in from the artistic cold. When he was painting his extraordinarily detailed pictures of birds he was considered just an illustrator - a dirty word in artistic circles.

Now, in this and his other recent shows, he is a painter.

The quality of his drawing is still exceptional. He can portray 40 people in one painting and make each face a complete characterisation. The spin that makes them "art" is that some are left incomplete to show the process of their making. Others have constructional grids behind them. This, and details in a big painting of a nude man, have something of Leonardo in them.

The art historical reference is reinforced in another panel of 27 heads, all but one smiling and showing their teeth. They are Baroque studies in expression and temperament, such as Franz Xavier Messerschmidt did in the 18th century.

Further spin is put on these experimental representations by presenting four portraits in a row, with one of them erased and just a ghost on the black background.

Female nudes are the real triumph of the exhibition and some go beyond mannerisms of presentation to grip our minds and eyes with truth.

Particularly moving is a painting of artists' models; two young women, three of the artist's rubbed-out drawings and, in the lower central panel, a majestic nude of an ageing woman, solid as a sibyl on the Sistine ceiling, massive as Sarah Siddons as The Tragic Muse in Reynold's great painting in Dulwich.

Can you walk a knife-edge and give work a delicate spin at the same time - or is that too mixed a metaphor? Yet mixed metaphor may well be appropriate for the mixed response provoked by Yvonne Todd's photographs, at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until November 16. Here the Walters Prize winner's spin is very subtle.

Ostensibly these are handsome studio portraits of women who happen to work at cosmetic counters. Some are dressed in immaculate white uniforms with chrome buttons, others wear the badges of the brands they represent.

They are all carefully made up. They wear the mask of beauty.

The only thing that takes these images subtley in the direction of art rather than good commercial photography is that these good-looking women do not smile. They are extraordinarily wary.

The show is titled Bellevue; the view of these belles is of inner tension and a sense of withdrawal behind the mask of their trade.

The women are attractive but sullen.

Their difficulties of coping with the world and their trade may not reflect their inner character as much as it reflects the artist's feelings about the pressure on women in our society.