Colour is a kind of bliss
Cover image Virginia Coventry Vertical Green (detail) 2018 acrylic on plywood, 60 x 40cm
23 March – 1 May 2022 Delmar Gallery
Colour is a kind of bliss Ralph Balson Virginia Coventry Hilarie Mais Paul Selwood Curator: Sioux Garside
Colour is a kind of bliss 1 I was becoming obsessed by color…making the sculptures as they appeared in my mind’s eye I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take painting off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake. This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color.2 Anne Truit
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors… Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room…or none at all.3 Donald Judd
When conceiving this exhibition of painting in symbiosis with sculpture, I was thinking about the continuation and significance of abstraction as a visual language – still so relevant in contemporary art – and how colour could determine form and form determine colour. This is especially so for a great deal of art made since the mid 20th century. Anne Truit described the seductive power of colour to create embodied feeling set free in space, while Donald Judd discussed the concept of expanding painting beyond planar illusionism into the spatial dimensions of architecture. The period of colour field painting and minimalist art also corresponds to the time when Virginia Coventry, Hilarie Mais and Paul Selwood were studying and developing their practice in Australia and overseas. Each of them employs the intoxicating attributes of colour to shape and construct new relational forms in real space. Ralph Balson Construction Painting Orange 1948 oil on composition board, 61.5 x 50.5cm Gift of Patrick White 1980, Wollongong Art Gallery Collection
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I also wanted to consider the precedent of Grace Crowley (1890-1979) and Ralph Balson (1890-1964), two significant painters in the Sydney artworld in the 1940s and ’50s. I believe their colour geometries are an important precursor for artists working today. There are affinities and synchronicities between the way they used colour to convey vibrancy and spatial illusion in a two-dimensional field, and the advance of colour into expansive multi-dimensional work by Coventry, Mais and Selwood. The paintings of Crowley and Balson were influential in teaching and advancing abstraction in Sydney. Crowley’s subtle paintings of coloured shapes and linear rhythms in a compressed space were informed by the theories of cubism and dynamic symmetry that she studied during two years spent in Paris from 1929-30. Crowley had learnt about Malevich and Russian constructivism while attending lectures in Paris at Ferdinand Léger’s Academie de l’Art Moderne in 1929.4 Although her work was overlooked in her lifetime, I believe it continues to exert influence through the beauty and exactitude of her colour. Regrettably none of her geometric abstract paintings were available for loan during the time of this exhibition. However, three seminal works by Balson are featured in the exhibition which date from the time when he and Crowley were exhibiting and painting side by side. Together they had sought a non-figurative style of abstraction based on pure geometry. Painting No. 17 1941 by Balson is an iconic abstract painting made at a key moment in the history of Australian modernism. It is a universe of floating geometry held in an indefinable, harmonic force field. Rectangles on a diagonal axis suggest a whirling pinwheel motion held in tension by a centralised building block of square and triangular shapes. The dynamism of receding and advancing dots and disks of colour accented with black add a pulsating pattern of energy. This constructivist masterwork was included in Balson’s pioneer solo exhibition of non-representational painting in Anthony Hordern’s gallery. Balson was an avid reader of art magazines and catalogues. Amongst his or Crowley’s books was a copy of the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of Cubism and Abstract Art (1936).5 This comprehensive exhibition of 400 mostly European works had included pioneer Frank Kupka’s Disks of Newton (Study for fugue in two colours) 1912 – a reference to the English physicist’s discovery that the light of
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Virginia Coventry Gentle Gradient 1 (detail) 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, overall size 40 x 210cm 7
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the sun is composed of seven colours of the spectrum. Given Balson’s interest in science and optics, he would not have overlooked Kupka’s reference. The exhibition also included Kasmir Malevich’s suprematist compositions of 1918 and nine works by Piet Mondrian. Balson had a copy of Mondrian’s Plastic and Pure Plastic Art (1947), describing him as “the greatest single influence... I believe him to have been the only really abstract painter”.6 In reference to abstract form Mondrian stated, “It is a composition of rectangular colour planes that expresses the most profound reality. It achieves this by plastic expression of relationships and not by natural appearance.”7 After absorbing the lessons of cubism, Mondrian thought colour in painting must be clearly delimited if it were to convey plasticity of form or the illusion of form. This influence is evident in the vibrant delineation between chroma and hue in the squares and overlapping planes of Balson’s Construction Painting Orange 1948, which gives luminosity and the pulsating forms their depth. His attention to the craft of painting is meticulous in the blending of colours and brush strokes to determine the contours of shapes in Construction…Transparent Planes 1942. One might speculate that a lifetime working full-time as a house painter gave Balson a particular knowledge of the effects of colour in architectural settings. Mondrian had proposed the idea that the future achievement or “true realization in painting lies in chromoplastic architecture.”8 If Balson had lived beyond the early ’60s when he began to experiment with the flow and materiality of colour, he might well have gone on to produce a transcendent vision of colour in multi-dimensional art, although perhaps not as far as Malevich who proclaimed in 1920, “I have ripped through the lining of the coloured sky, torn it down and into the bag thus formed, put colour, tying it up with a knot. Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.”9 Coventry, Mais and Selwood all appreciate the planar colour fields of Balson yet expand their exploration of colour to pursue space, light, illusion and relations of sensation in multi-dimensional works. Their work results from sustained critical thinking and persistent observation in the studio. Paul Selwood completed his initial studies in sculpture at East Sydney Technical College, followed by a stint at the Royal College of Art in London where he made
Paul Selwood Construction Zone 2020 rusted and varnished steel, 244 x 244cm Collection of the artist
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his first sculptures in the mid 1960s. He also spent time as an assistant in the studio of British sculptor Anthony Caro. Caro believed that “the future of sculpture lies in the ability to tackle and confront its boundaries with painting.” Just as important was his belief that the twentieth century sculptural avant-garde stems from cubism. These ideas were inspirational for the 20 year-old Selwood, and continue to be foundational concepts. Another important connection in London was American colour-field painter Kenneth Noland, whom he met while installing Noland’s horizontal stripe paintings at the Kasmin Gallery. Noland described the difficulty of using colour on sculpture, suggesting “the material takes precedence as a form, rather than colour establishing the form…There’s something about colour that is so abstract that it is difficult to function in conjunction with solid form. Colour has properties of weight, density and transparency, and so forth.”10 Mais and Selwood might agree with this proposition but take up the challenge to invent new ways to embed colour in their works. As Mais explains, “I am a sculptor: I construct, I work with metal, wood and glass – materials that carry the colour of their materiality... working in physical space rather than illusory space was the primary appeal of working in three dimensions.”11 Selwood is equally committed to the language of sculpture yet experiments with tonal colour to make the texture and mass of steel more resonant and expansive. Selwood is aware of environmental organic colour. In his Construction Zone 2020 he controls the catalytic process of rust to create a tonal patination of iron oxide on steel that can be fixed with varnish. By alternating glossy and matt panels a startling illusion of linear perspective and sculptural complexity is achieved, with an appearance of solidity and depth in defiance of gravity. A painter may use shadows to define volume and depth. A drawn outline provides Selwood with the linear design he uses to make successive directional cuts – up, down, and across on a single sheet of steel. Each plane is then reconfigured to make a cohesive dynamic structure. Sky Temple and Forest Shade emphasise metaphoric movement through the expansion of coloured planes in space. Initially each colour tone projects a planar orientation within a shallow depth of field, however as one moves around the sculpture, a different pattern emerges. The balance between
Paul Selwood Forest Shade 2021 painted steel, 106 x 82 x 24cm 10
positive and negative space changes as silhouettes and shadows come into play. When Mais began her studies in sculpture at Winchester School of Art in 1972 followed by the Slade School of Art in London, she manoeuvred herself into the painting studio to better study the key scientific colour theories of Goethe, Chevreul, Josef Albers and Johnanne Itten. In his well-known colour square experiments, Albers realised that “colour is changing continually: with changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity… And just as influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and consequently of receptiveness. All of this will make [us] aware of an exciting discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of colour.”12 A physiological sensation of colour is vital to Mais: “I use colour as tone, as an emotional note of an indicator of rhythm or system within the work”, she says.13 A pattern of alternating green, blue and violet hues creates a diagonal ripple across the gridded irregular boundaries of Rain. There is a blurring or overlap of boundaries between where one colour ends and another begins, a continuous movement that makes colour and form a fluid whole. Her open-ended grid constructions have skins of layered colour that accentuate the multidimensional effects of figure and ground, light and shade, allowing spatial penetration into their inner core. On the reverse side of several of the grids Mais sometimes paints pigment to deflect an aura of colour back onto the white wall of the gallery. As a child, Mais collected paint charts for the colours and their descriptive names, perceiving the order of the chromatic spectrum as “the ultimate sequence”. Her interest in ordering and naming of things expanded to include mathematical formula used to determine form based on systems of growth found in nature: “...in the search for order, the underlying logic, in identifying sequence and pattern. Also the beauty in nature as governed by mathematical systems of growth and adaption, and numbering systems like the Fibonacci and the Golden Mean.”14 For more than 30 years, Mais kept a diary of colour with her late partner, artist and curator Bill Wright. The chromatic resonance of Red Yellow Blue Diary 2012 of adjacent woven grids of three primary hues is a tribute to their collaborative experiments with
Hilarie Mais Night Beats 2018 acrylic on wood, 181 x 181 x 4cm 13
colour. This work also points to Alexander Rodchenko’s triptych Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour 1921 as an historical precedent. Mais cites the Russian constructivist artists including Vladimir Tatlin and Lyubov Popova as influences on her early thinking about grids and artwork that incorporates the floor and wall. What connects Coventry to sculpture is the subtle move from pictorial illusion into installation and the architectural space and light of the viewer. She describes her approach: “Both the paintings and the gallery…are thought of as spatial fields where the dimensions, the distribution of colours and the crossing of natural and artificial light might be brought into relationship.”15 Coventry completed her post-graduate studies in painting at the Slade School of Art in 1968 following a first degree from RMIT in Melbourne. While she worked with photography throughout the 1970s, by the mid ’80s she felt ready to reclaim painting as her chosen medium: “I wanted to return to working more directly, physically, in the light, with colour, and to be engaged with the invisible and the multi-sensory.”16 Her sensuous particularity to the experience of infinitesimal changes of light in the studio resulted in Untitled [Pink/Orange], one of an exquisite series of paintings of 2009. Perhaps Coventry is closest in spirit to Balson, in the way in which feeling is conveyed through a critical adjustment of the opacities, transparencies, absorption and reflection of pigment in light. The quantities and configurations of the colours Coventry mixes are as important as the intrinsic qualities of the colours chosen. She is adept at maximising sensations with a minimum of colour and subtle alterations in shaping form. “I use metallic and interference pigments to create ‘live’, vibrant surfaces that continually change in response to different light and angles of view,” she says.17 Sudden Light 2 and Gentle Gradient 1 are shaped paintings on timbered planes that project an immersive field of dimensionality somehow existing in a liminal arena between painting and sculpture. Coventry has clearly defined her intention: Light defines the angle and slope of gentle gradients; colour intensifies and turns corners; solids cast shadows; we see afterimages…slantwise…at intervals…
Hilarie Mais Shake 2012 acrylic on wood, 77 x 77 x 4cm 15
Depending on the light and angle of view, thin washes of opaque colour appear as either solid or transparent. There is an interplay between material and visual depth within each assemblage. In some works illusionistic, atmospheric colour is in tension with the precision-cut, sharp-edged solidity of the support. Shadows cast by the modules in installation are intended to further alter the perception of colour depth. Looking at these constructions from a few paces back in the studio I am reminded of the way jump cuts in film fracture fluidity of movement from one moment to the next.18 Like Mais, Coventry concentrates on using the language of abstraction “to translate our innermost responses to embodied experience. More recently my work has proposed ‘an acoustics of colour’ – a concept that picks up on the way we use the terms tones, keys and pitches in thinking and talking about both colour and sound.”19 Mondrian especially used musical analogies when explaining his art: “Painting has shown me that the equilibrated composition of colour relationships ultimately surpasses naturalistic composition…the more purely we perceive harmony, the more purely we will express relationships of colour and sound”.20 Colour is the prism through which we might look to the art of the past. It provides us with the most complex and profound sensory experiences that derive from our exceptional vision. It was Malevich who believed “that colour must pass out of the pictorial mix into an independent unity…The system to be constructed in time and space independently of any aesthetic considerations of beauty, experience or mood, but rather as a philosophical colour system”.21 Balson was interested in physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity that abolished established notions of space and time and replaced Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity. He described its importance for his evolving aesthetic philosophy, “As I see it, it is man’s comprehension and understanding that alters his striving to bring the universe within the range of his sense perception…I can realise that the energy, the atoms that reach us from the sun is the source, the rhythm of existence, and the very narrow band, the spectrum, is all we can ever hope to have to try to reach a small amount of the rhythm of the universe with the substance of paint.”22 His constructivist paintings were deeply felt explorations of the potential for
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painting to reveal underlying truths about the nature of reality and the scientific discoveries of the 20th century such as quantum physics and atomic energy. There is a shared language of colour to be discovered here despite the eighty years separating us from Balson’s time. Coventry, Mais and Selwood engage with the transmission of feeling through the bliss of colour, building on the possibilities of expanding spatial concepts and harmonics for their own transformation of inert substance into vibrant painting and sculpture. Sioux Garside February, 2022
1 The title is inspired by a Roland Barthes poem quoted by Dr Susan Best in Colour, Composition and Non-Composition: New work by Virginia Coventry, Liverpool Street Gallery, 2010 2 Anne Truit, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist [1974-79], Penguin, Middlesex, 1982, p.401 3 Donald Judd “Specific Objects”1965 reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990, ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p.813 4 In attendance were Russian artists Alexandra Exter, who had been teaching a program titled Colour in Space, and Nadia Khodasevich, who studied with Malevich 1919-1921. Margel Hinder, Modern in Motion ed. Lesley Harding and Denise Mimmocchi, AGNSW 2021, p.89 5 Daniel Thomas, “Ralph Balson” in Recent Past Writing Australian Art, ed. Hannah Fink and Steven Miller, AGNSW 2020 p.46 6 ibid. 7 Piet Mondrian “Neo-Plasticism: the General Principle of Plastic Equivalence” 1921, reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990, op. cit., p.288 8 ibid., p.289 9 Kasimir Malevich, “Non-objective Art and Suprematism”, reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990, op. cit., p.292 10 Kenneth Noland, “Colour, Format and Abstract Art: interview by Diane Waldman” 1977 in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, University of California Press 1996 p.96.
11 Hilarie Mais in conversation with William Wright AM, Hilarie Mais, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2017 p.38 12 Josef Albers, “The Colour in My Paintings” in Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964, np. 13 Hilarie Mais in conversation with William Wright AM, op. cit., p.41 14 ibid., p.37 15 Virginia Coventry, Liverpool St Gallery, media release, September 2010 16 Virginia Coventry in conversation with Terence Maloon, In Place, exhibition catalogue, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 2007 p.5 17 Virginia Coventry, Liverpool St Gallery, media release, September 2010 18 Virginia Coventry: Sudden Light, catalogue statement May 2020 19 Virginia Coventry: Lightworks, exhibition catalogue, text by Charles Nodrum and Terence Maloon, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2020 p.36 20 Mondrian, “Dialogue on the New Plastic” 1919 in Art in Theory 1900-1990, op. cit., p.286 21 Malevich “Non-objective Art and Suprematism”, op. cit., p.291 22 Ralph Balson, 1960, letter in the AGNSW archives
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Virginia Coventry Sudden Light 2 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, overall size 40 x 280cm
Ralph Balson Painting No. 17 1941 oil and metallic paint on cardboard 91.7 x 64.8cm Private collection 20
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Ralph Balson The Construction...Transparent Planes 1942 oil on cardboard, 68.4 x 90cm Gift of Tanya Crothers and Darani Lewers, 1979, Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest Collection.
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Virginia Coventry Vertical Green 2018 acrylic on plywood, 60 x 40cm Untitled [Pink/Orange] 2009 acrylic, vinyl, micaceous pigments on linen, 180 x 145cm
Virginia Coventry Gentle Gradient 1 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, overall size 40 x 210cm
Hilarie Mais Mend 2019 acrylic on wood, 134 x 134 x 5cm 28
Hilarie Mais Rain 2001 oil on wood, 180 x 243 x 4cm 29
Paul Selwood Sky Temple 2021 painted steel, 122 x 66 x 15cm 30
LIST OF WORKS RALPH BALSON (1890 - 1964)
HILARIE MAIS (1952 –)
Painting No 17 1941 oil and metallic paint on cardboard, 91.7 x 64.8cm Private collection
Red Yellow Blue Diary 2012 acrylic on wood, three units, overall size 43 x 133 x 5cm
The Construction… Transparent Planes 1942 oil on cardboard, 68.4 x 90cm Gift of Tanya Crothers and Darani Lewers, 1979, Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest Collection
Shake 2012 acrylic on wood, 77 x 77 x 4cm
Construction Painting Orange 1948 oil on composition board, 61.5 x 50.5cm Gift of Patrick White 1980, Wollongong Art Gallery Collection
Rain 2001 oil on wood, 180 x 243 x 4cm Open Ghost 2018 acrylic on wood, 186 x 186 x 4cm Mend 2019 acrylic on wood, 134 x 134 x 5cm
Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Ralph Balson
Pillow 2019 acrylic on wood, 67 x 68 x 4cm
VIRGINIA COVENTRY (1942 –)
Night Beats 2018 acrylic on wood, 181 x 181 x 4cm
Untitled [Pink/Orange] 2009 acrylic, vinyl, micaceous pigments on linen, 180 x 145cm Sudden Light 2 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, overall size 40 x 280cm Gentle Gradient 1 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, overall size 40 x 210cm
PAUL SELWOOD (1946 –) Construction Zone 2020 rusted and varnished steel, 244 x 244cm Collection of the artist Forest Shade 2021 painted steel, 106 x 82 x 24cm Sky Temple 2021 painted steel, 122 x 66 x 15cm
Vertical Green 2018 acrylic on plywood, 90 x 40cm
Glow 2022 painted steel, 200.5 x 75 x 35cm
Gentle Gradient 2 2019 acrylic on four plywood modules, 40 x 230cm Private collection
A Chink in the Wall Variation 2009 rusted and varnished steel, 41 x 49.5cm
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Delmar Gallery gratefully acknowledges the institutional and private lenders who have generously made their paintings available for the exhibition: Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest; Wollongong Art Gallery; and private collectors in Sydney and Canberra. Thank you to the artists’ galleries for their support and assistance: representing Paul Selwood, King Street Gallery on William (Sydney) and Charles Nodrum Gallery (Melbourne); representing Hilarie Mais, KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT; and representing Virginia Coventry, Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney) and Charles Nodrum Gallery (Melbourne). Special thanks to the artists for readily agreeing to the exhibition concept and the presentation of their works, and to Ralph Balson’s estate for granting permission to reproduce his paintings. Sioux Garside is an independent curator whose recent major exhibitions and monographs include DNA of Colour: Ildiko Kovacs and Elisabeth Cummings: Interior Landscapes, presented by Orange Regional Gallery and ANU Drill Hall Gallery. This is the second exhibition she has guest-curated for Delmar Gallery, following RAW Wedderburn in 2018. Her scholarship and curatorial nous are exceptional and it is a privilege to work with her. Delmar Gallery extends particular thanks to Sioux for the vision and expertise she has shared in curating this exhibition.
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Paul Selwood Sky Temple 2021 (verso) painted steel, 122 x 66 x 15cm
Colour is a kind of bliss. Lacerates something, passes in front of the eye, apparition, disappearance, like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell. Appears, is there, inscribed, Colour as sensual idea. ROLAND BARTHES
Published by Delmar Gallery, Sydney Colour is a kind of bliss 23 March - 1 May 2022 Curated by Sioux Garside ISBN 978-0-6483385-0-5 Copyright remains with the artists and authors. Unauthorised reproduction prohibited. Photography by David Hempenstall (pp. 13, 33 & 36) and Silversalt (page 26) Delmar Gallery Staff Catherine Benz, Curator Christine Smalley, Gallery Assistant Tony Mighell, Exhibition Installation
DELMAR GALLERY Trinity Grammar School 144 Victoria Street Ashfield NSW 2131 Australia trinity.nsw.edu.au/delmar-gallery