Night Tide and Constellation are being shown by the Adam Gallery at the London Art Fair this week.

They belong to a group of large new works on paper that take the series of drawings I have made in recent years under an open sky on the east coast to a new level and scale. It conjures up a particular space where land and water meet, where the shifting light radiates across the salt marshes and where the tides move back and forth through the delicate maze of creeks and channels. It is also about the passage of time, a record not only of my own presence within this aqueous field but also of the incidental life that flows over it, from the migrating birds to the scattered flora that lines the ancient tracks and colours the scattered margins of distant islands.

These images, like others before them, was made on a single day, and the prevailing conditions are mirrored in the drawing, in the way it succumbs to a sea breeze, an enveloping mist, or a sudden downpour. Pigment dissolves, runs and dries in unforeseen ways (and with unexpected results) as the paper’s surface becomes rain spattered, mud flecked, or softened by the rising waters. And each time the resulting image belongs as much to the elements as to the artist who began it.

London Art Fair 18 - 22 January 2012



Wilhelm Sasnal conjures up images that are on occasion both original and memorable, and yet they are often strikingly casual in their execution. When he states that painting is hard work it seems curiously at odds with the slight, almost breezy, results of his labour. How, you wonder when looking at them, does he know when a painting is finished, complete in his own terms?

This is less of a problem with the images drawn from photographs (Kacper & Anka 2009, above), which seem to resemble painted photographs, than with other less resolved paintings – a blank wall, a cursory head study - where he appears to be challenging the viewer to decide whether there is enough there to detain us or not. One painting (Untitled 2008) has been painted and rubbed down over the course of 7 days, leaving just a faintly drawn planet shape on a worn canvas surface. The unfinished work, he suggests, is finished when it returns to its own starting point. In this way he distances himself from the image, questioning not just the subject matter (apocalyptic or banal?) but also the very reason for painting it. By adopting many different approaches to paint, touching variously on photorealism, graphic design and abstract gestures, he disengages himself and the viewer from the medium and asks what the painting means and, simultaneously, what is the meaning of painting?

Wilhelm Sasnal, Whitechapel Gallery, until 1 January 2012



Let's begin at the end of the show, with the Cage paintings. Starting with loose gestural marks, Richter steadily smears and obliterates the wet surface until what is left is an opaque film that only faintly reveals the fractured trace or accidental residue of previous actions. To the extent it follows its own logic it is reductively ‘abstract’, but without the floating incidents that animate Abstract 849 for example, there is little to hold onto visually, little to suggest a way in or through the pallid top coat. The surface, now verging on emptiness, becomes the work. The gallery text, by way of explanation, alludes to John Cage’s gnomic statement, ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it’, while Richter, in his recent interview with Nicholas Serota, states that ‘paintings show what isn’t there’.

But it is unclear to me whether he means there is something which painting cannot grasp or whether there is nothing (or only silence) beyond the paint’s surface. If most painters instinctively adopt the former position, the latter is undoubtedly a more challenging premise from which to begin working, If there is nothing to begin with, then is the paint simply an iterative statement of existence (Richter: ‘I have no choice. I do it’), leaving the viewer with nowhere to go? The curatorial reference to Cage, resting on a title originally proposed by another curator, might equally be construed as another sort of cage, from which neither painter nor painting can escape.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern, to Jan 2012



Luke Elwes discusses Robert Motherwell’s work with Sam Cornish

I think for many it is ‘Elegy to the Spanish Republic’, that monumental series begun in 1949, which defines Motherwell’s place in the modernist canon. So it is refreshing to revisit him on a smaller scale in this show (the first dedicated to his work on paper in this country), and to see, beneath the shadow of his most iconic images, something more rapid, visceral and intuitive going on. You explore the role of automatism in your catalogue essay and his adherence to the unmediated mark is consistent throughout his work (with the possible exception of the ‘Open’ series, to which we might return) and reaches a daring crescendo in the ‘Lyric Suite’...

Read the full discussion on abstractcritical

Robert Motherwell Open Study No. 3 1968 Charcoal on paper 55.88 x 77.47 cms 22 x 30 1/2 ins

Robert Motherwell, Works on Paper,Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, until 26th November 2011