There is, in the recent paintings of Estelle Thompson and Robert Bordo, a refreshing marriage of pictorial invention and personal experience. Both play with the formal language of grids, fields and boundaries mapped out by Abstraction. Thompson’s images might appear more hard-edged and devoid of painterly marks, while Bordo’s are softer and more languorous, and yet each manages to animate their theoretical terms with the evident pleasure and curiosity they take in the world around them (whether it is the pink of a plastic bag in the case of one or the puddles on a muddy lane in the case of the other). In the singular way they find sensory and chromatic equivalence to the visual space of their own lives, they succeed in capturing a mood that is cool and playful without being ironic or self-important.

Bordo’s new work carries echoes of Howard Hodgkin, although the filter is more cerebral than emotional, while the practiced lightness and seductive touch of his brushwork shares something with Twombly’s late handling.  The austere structures in Thompson’s work belong to the world of Mondrian and Malevich, while the ghost of her touch (the handmade disturbance and incidental shadows on the surface) brings their past into her present.  If her blocks of colour are now much tauter, less diffuse and radiant than before, their curious juxtaposition (as in the red purple and silver of ‘Past Present Future’) is guided more by instinct than process, generating a certain mood and latent force - something experienced in the ‘slow burn’ of the viewer’s response.
Similarly, Bordo’s ‘Back Road’ gives us the familiarity of a ‘landscape’ without letting go of his need to resolve the image in its own terms.  This manipulation of the ambiguous space between thinking and seeing is a fine balancing act, and the best results can show you how a painter thinks in paint.

Robert Bordo: Back Road. Mummery & Schnelle, 14 Oct – 21 Nov 2009
Estelle Thompson. Purdy Hicks, 14 Oct – 9 Nov 2009

Sometimes a picture conceived in one context assumes an unexpected meaning in another, as when an author finds his own particular imagery reflected in the painted surface.

    ‘ Come with me,’ says the old man at last. He helps Kit to his feet and leads him to the other parapet, where he points far upstream. ‘Look over there.’
    Kit follows the line of his arm and sees that the river below them emerges from a delta where seven other rivers have come together. They could, he thinks, be described as lesser rivers; yet each is so mighty in its own right that the word is inappropriate. They seem at once to flow down from the sky and break from beneath the earth, rushing vigorously, glinting in the sun..
    ‘These are the rivers,’ says Kit’s great-grandfather, ‘that flow between heaven and earth, and between earth and heaven.’
    ‘Where do they begin?’ Kit asks.
    ‘They begin at the fountain of life, and they end in the ocean of eternity; but the fountain is never exhausted, and the ocean is never full. And when they reach that delta, they mingle with each other and with springs you cannot see to form the river of life, encompassing everything men know and imagine and what they have yet to imagine. In its waters are mingled past and present and future, actuality and possibility.’

Extract from Anthony Gardner's new book 'The Rivers of Heaven', published this month. Find on Amazon

Over the past two years this small patch of ground has become a roofless studio, a space where time and the seasons have washed over successive sheets of paper taped onto old boards and wooden bench tops. Each time, each day, what emerges in the fluid engagement with earth, water and paper is as much to do with the transient light, the sea breeze and rising tide as with what is rapidly enacted on a white surface with crayon, pen, ink and watercolour.

How the drawing starts, by way of returning to familiar territory in search of a fresh impression, a new image, is perhaps less important than how it proceeds, how it is shaped by the prevailing conditions. Its colour, patina and markings become a kind of record of an elemental process, as the marine light shifts and the ground continually softens and swells beneath the paper.

The visible forms of creeks and channels mutate in the tidal wash, as the warm earth and grassy banks dissolve in the rising salt water. Later on, as the dykes and inlets drain away into thin silver trails, the marshes bubble and glisten with reflected light. Green and yellow tinted ridges are thrown into sharp relief against meandering ribbons of dark mud, while, a little further out, bleached expanses of old pasture, imprinted with the fragile lines of ancient tracks, are broken up by silken maze-like passages. Pathways run like memories along the coastal wall before leading the eye out in sinuous broken trails across aqueous plains towards clustered islets that shimmer and float on a pale blue horizon.

This transient realm is mirrored in the drawing, in the way it succumbs to a brisk sea breeze, an enveloping winter mist, or to 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 simply chilled and dampened by the seasonal air. And each time the resulting image belongs as much to the elements as to the artist who began it.

Luke Elwes: Secret Water, Broadbent Gallery, London, 3 September - 10 October 2009

View the online catalogue here

Howard Hodgkin feels his way through the world in colour. It conveys desire, longing and loss in equal measure. And in the new work it has outgrown its intimate frame (although the frame remains, as a container of vision and experience), to embrace the viewer more wholeheartedly. If ‘As Time Goes By’ is the subject of the work it also suggests the time taken to resolve the image (the patient assembly of inks and processes in the printer’s studio), as well as the nature of its visual reception, simultaneously rapid and instinctive and slow and cumulative.

The sensory pleasure it evokes (appropriately for an artist long preoccupied with the light and colour of India) is comparable to that of the Marwari paintings now showing at the British Museum (‘Garden & Cosmos’: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur). It is there in the sensual expanse of their walled gardens and pavilions, and particularly in the vivid depiction of the Holi festival, in which splashes of  colour are released over the elegant pale surfaces with the same joyful abandon that Hodgkin achieves. The riot is all the more striking for the orderly confinement, physical and psychological, within which it is enacted.

He is one of many artists drawn eastward, although his work belongs more to the garden than the cosmos, to the realm of appearance rather than the reality that exists beneath and beyond the temporal surface. The golden emptiness of ‘The Emergence of Spirit and Matter’ recalls James Lee Byer’s gilded chamber (currently on display at the Guggenheim New York), and draws inevitable parallels with other kinds of numinous space (Newman, Rothko) in which form arises from the formless.  Emptiness suggests timelessness, and the final extinguishing of that desire which shapes our conscious hours. If Hodgkin’s painting celebrates the garden’s momentary splendour, those of the Jodhpur court reveal their illusory nature, and indicate the stateless void that lies beyond it’s fecund enclosure.

Howard Hodgkin: ‘As Time Goes By’. Alan Cristea Gallery, to 11 July 2009.

Garden & Cosmos. British Museum, to 23 August 2009.

The ominous spaces and knotted surfaces that made Michael Raedecker’s  work mysteriously engaging and original a decade ago (Kismet 1999, left) have been replaced with something altogether more spare and understated in his new work (now at the  Camden Arts Centre). In their cerebral austerity and chromatic palour they  seem to suppress that once dynamic playful quality which gave the viewer some imaginative purchase on his world.

There is not much to go on when gazing at the large works in particular. They appear incomplete and only sketchily realised in their oddly scaled-up format. The strongest of them, a large triptych with luminous circles suggestive of sodium street lighting in a grey mist, is visually compromised by the dead weight of stitching in the heavily emphasised vertical (lamp)posts.

The smaller pieces work better: in the flowers delicately picked out with flecks of coloured thread on a musty brown field, and in the pale pink carpet motif, with its woven zig-zags and its gently animated field of tiny textile markings. The former references the Dutch genre scenes of his homeland, while the latter seductively reworks a Rothko-like numinous field in fabric and canvas.  The allusions to art history work best where they are clearest, but sometimes their obliqueness works against them, making them not so much clever as random and arbitrary.

The postmodern framing of familiar genre scenes is knowingly correct but ultimately one comes away feeling that something – atmosphere, substance, movement – has been sacrificed, and wondering whether what is left are simply paler, more deathly, versions of Peter Doig’s uncanny tableaux, just with a little signature embroidery added in.

Michael Raedecker: line-up, Camden Arts Centre, 01 May - 28 June 2009