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

    ‘ 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

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.

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

The ten paintings, made in the last five years, not only illuminate particular journeys (to North Africa, Tibet and Central America) but also reveal a recurring impulse, to excavate the ‘geographical unconscious’ and explore the many layers of history buried beneath the surface matter of these places. Brought together in one place, and viewed at a certain physical and emotional distance (that is, away from the self and the studio, in another space and another city), the paintings display a kind of circular narrative, about the life that feeds the painting that feeds the life to come.

Luke Elwes, Peintures récentes. Galerie hotel Le Marceau-Bastille, Paris. 30 April – 30 September 2009

There are various threads that are drawn together in this new enterprise, and by the opening show Mythologies in the old museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens, and in an uncanny echo of its physical location (between the Royal Academy and Cork street, homes of the new and old, the public and private) they are primarily to do with the circulation of art and the recycling of history.

There has in truth never been any clear distinction between gallery, museum and auction house.  Private collectors have been the lifeblood of all three, as much in the past (Henry Tate, Lord Elgin) as today. Francois Pinault’s fortune in luxury goods lies behind both Christies’ business and his own art collection (some of which has been acquired through Haunch of Venison), while Anthony d’Offay’s acumen as a dealer not only resulted in one of the Tate’s largest single donations but also laid the foundations for Haunch of Venison ‘s existence. It was d’ Offay who bought the lease on their original site from Phillips’ auctioneers, and many of the artists he once showed are today represented by the new gallery.

New art acquires critical value through its careful placement in historic collections, and commercial value in its movement between the primary and secondary markets. New galleries once relied on the guardians of the past to validate the art of the present. But what if the present is positioned in the past in such a way as to short-circuit this traditional process?

This is the question posed by Haunch of Venison, a gallery that began its life in a building once occupied by Lord Nelson and then moved from the home of an imperial hero to a museum that once housed a multitude of exotic artefacts collected from the far corners of that empire. Thus the trophies of a new global economy replace those of an old one, aligning their value as future history with that of the past.  The ghosts of history are everywhere present in Mythologies; Haunch of Venison has constructed a museum, a cabinet of curiosities, in which the aura of the past is summoned to the present, and in which the present is ‘mythologized’ for the future

The names of the makers may be familiar (Hirst, Viola, Tyson) rather than anonymous, but in the way they are curated, displayed and catalogued, their pristine objects become cultural commodities once more, ready to be acquired, collected, housed and archived.

Mythologies, Haunch of Venison, 12 march - 25 April 2009

There is a spare poetry in her new work, the rubbed down hardness and  salty gleam of its forms alluding to an older history, and in particular to the Gaelic tongue in which she continues to immerse herself. They are mysterious and painstaking, an act of distilled contemplation on a distant northern shore that has been continually reshaped through time and memory. They leave behind the mark of her elegant scrutiny, in a way that is reminiscent of Vija Celmins, who once said, ‘I try to leave the evidence of both thinking and making… like a fingerprint of all I know’.

Helen MacAlister, New Paintings & Drawings, Art First Projects, London, to 19 march 2009

It seems to me that Cy Twombly has achieved a kind of epiphany in this new work. Following on from the Blooming series of 2007, The Rose series, painted last year in Gaeta and now showing at Gagosian London, not only embodies the late flowering of a long and complex career but also represents the most dramatic kind of affirmation of painting’s continuing power and promise.

Jonathan Jones (in The Guardian 2/2/09) compares the impact of seeing them with the experience of encountering Titian’s late work for the first time. It must have been the same too with Monet and his last great waterlily canvases. They also manage to convey something of the elation that Matisse must have felt when assembling those dancing paper cut outs in his final pictures.

They are both light and monumental, spare and effulgent, their vibrant forms laid out with directness and simplicity onto newly liberated expanses of chromatic intensity. Twombly’s hands are palpably present in the smeared pigment and tactile scribblings on the surface of these vast panels, while the pulsing immediacy of his reds and yellows radiate outwards with childish glee.

The words he borrows, loosely grouped fragments of Rilke’s poetry, drift along the margins like an artist’s urgent annotations on his own work, one ‘dedicated to our memories’ and ‘linked to our dreams’. They are as transient as the rose heads and they resonate with melancholic pleasure; the paint is as ‘wet as one who weeps’.  But above all, near the end of his painting life, it is the full-blooded moment of flowering, in all its corporeal energy and pleasure, which has captivated him. In the simplest possible terms he recovers a reason to paint.

Cy Twombly, The Rose, Gagosian Gallery, February 12 - May 9, 2009

Portal 2009

The first recalls a stop on the journey, one of many in which a traveller pauses, as though on the threshold of the future, to both reflect on and measure out the days of walking that lie ahead. From within the darkened space of this passage or gateway (the kind of place which often represents a state of transition in this pilgrimage territory), the eye moves away into the distance, across the arid wind swept hills towards the luminous mountain peak that reaches up into the deep blue above.

Prayer 2009

This nebulous blue expanse forms the starting point for the second print. Prayer flags rise through falling snow into a sky that, at this altitude, seems close enough to reach out and touch. The spectral image formed by these lines of bright coloured cloth, frayed by time and the constant winds as they stretch out across a star - flecked field, reveal something of the sensation experienced in this thin atmosphere, of the permeable boundary between one world and another.

Portal. Lithograph, 13x13cm, printed in an edition of 100 by the Curwen Press, 2009
Prayer. Lithograph, 15x20cm, printed in an edition of 50 by the Curwen Press, 2009 (commissioned  by the Curwen Press as part of their 50th anniversary portfolio)