Page 54 - Studio International - January 1965

Refinements of the unique

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---- London Commentary by G. S. Whittet
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Each artist follows the track of his predecessor, willy­
nilly, in arriving at the point where he has the capacity
as much as the will to be different. Bryan Kneale.
showing his new metal sculptures at the Redfern
Galleries, has surpassed and perfected his previous
experiments in a manner that is wholly logical and
consequential. The chief characteristic of the new work
is its joining of disparate parts. These may be a cone, a
bottle shape, a scooped-out blade that resembles a
spade, a shield with an irregular quadrilateral section
cut from it. curved fins. The art comes in the associating
of these forms. one with another or two or three, often
by rods. bent straight or even wound into a runic circle.
The setting up of visual stresses in terms of masses and
their relationship in volume and space brings us into the
choreography of a still and inanimate ballet that is set
to the music of our own movement around it.
Worked in mild steel from found objects as well as
those cut and shaped for the purpose, there is a
tremendous and imposing presence in the contrasts
and associations these works conjure up. They are not
simple exercises in basic design as much metal sculp­
ture is but problems like those of a battle school. In
Prisoner's Base. for example. the decision is achieved in
the resolution of balance between the wide frontal
shield and the tapered. angled base section poised on
the fulcrum of the hinged upright that joins and yet
separates the two features. providing the essential
third. This three-part conflict which, as theatre
audiences know. is the basis of all drama is present in
the most successful of all Kneale's new works even
where the parts seem unified in the whole.
This is the world of steel warfare. We can recognise
the chassis of guns or other weapons that have a sharp
and cruel grotesquerie even in their smoothly turned
elegance. There is wit too, as in Coxcomb with its
serrated toothed tail that balances the spread wings of
the metal fowl. Bryan Kneale. whose paintings had
always that sharply faceted form. reaches now to the
three-dimensional image that he makes autographically
his own. In its penetrating analysis, it emphasises the
finality that results from a three-pronged object finding
its true point of balance. It is probably quite coinci­
dental that the artist comes from the Isle of Man whose
'arms· are three legs rotating on a central roundel.
Ulrica Schettini is a young Italian artist who first came
here about six years ago. His process of painting
involves a sensitive feeling for the texture and trans­
parency of the medium. His careful preparation of his
canvas, priming and underpainting with the application
of tissue paper, gives a subtly changing variation to his
bright vermilion backgrounds in which he imposes his
icon-like images. These, generally firm in outline, some­
times suggest too the transparency of the ground. This
flame-form gives to his paintings an identity that is
compelling in its flickering movement and brilliance.
Varnishing in a non-glossy finish endows the paintings,
many of them over six feet in breadth, with a subdued
surface reflection that allows the interior colours of
vermilion, gold and green to create their own effulgence.
Showing at McRoberts and Tunnard, Schettini restores
to painting some of its traditional quality of matiere with
an imagery of personal force.
Anne Dunn exhibiting her latest paintings at the
Leicester Galleries is refining her picture to an evocation
of plant life in water and woodland with skies providing
background to much of the skeining and tracery.
Plotting of Ii nes that suggest the thready stems of plants.
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