Killeen

Richard Killeen Peter McLeavey Galleries

Reviewed by Martin Edmond

There is in essay when an American art [unclear: ritic] says the dinger, the enemy, the thing to be overcome by anything that deserves to he called Art is, theatre. Fairly close reading gets it out that such teeatricality is possessed by works the man, Michael Fried, calls 'minimalist' and that it is the nature of such works to 'refuse to let him (the observer) alone, refuse to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him - and such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion.' Well, we get the drift. Fried is, whether you agree with him or not, at least adopting and defending a comprehensible position, which cannot be said of all who've written on Minimal Ant; and I think his notion of theatricality a useful one.

And having said all this I want now to say that Richard Killeen's work is not 'theatrical' in the sense outlined above. It's a show which has much in common with Ian Scott's exhibition at the same gallery last year; and there is a further similarity to be noted in the styles of painting the two have formerly adopted and abandoned. Like Scott's recent work, these paintings present more or less stereotyped and certainly stenciled motifs on a pure white ground. There is the rectangular shape of the canvas, a targe area of 'empty space' and the central motif with its qualifications. Scott's work is, however, on an altogether larger scale than Killeen's and is immediately impressive on account of its size - which is getting close again to Fried's theatricality, though I don't mean to suggest that Scott's work precisely fits the hill either. More of that later. Anyway, Killeen's thing is rather like a comb, especially those fittings shearers fit into their woolshed machines - doublesided, an assemblage of triangular shapes Winged along an axis more vertical than horizontal, with the sharp points out. Though the paintings are not small they are smaller than Scott's, a size I would call moderate. Which gives a relationship between the motif and its surrounds that is rather more intimate and in many of these, rather more playful.

I mean that there is about some of these timings and drawings something that is very entertaining, something humourous in the fanny figures. Catalogue number 2 for instance, one of the four drawings in the show, has two vividly coloured lowers of the comb motif, the [unclear: one] to the right tilted more from the vertical than that on the left. The colours - green orange red and several shades of blue - dance before your eyes, there is an impression of constant though not arbitrary and certainly not uncontrolled movement, which is delightful. And the painting called 'Whither', which has the comb motif done large and in orange, like a stack of coolie hats, gives a similar optical effect - though in this case, it has more to do depth ambiguity than with cross-movement. A painting like 'Vertebrae' is rather different and shows that Killeen need not work his magic in one direction only. The motif is the same, but in this work only a ghost of what it was, a grey presence seeming to hover over the surface of the white canvas - bones in early light indeed. The other work which deserves particular mention - out of a show where there are no duds is "Tokutoku' which I presume to be a work based on the configuration of latticework reed and flax panels used as wall decorations, especially in Maori meeting houses. That may or may not be important; the work is rather lovely, with its browns and yellows and reds superimposed on a slightly out of phase square grill - as if one were to say, its shifted, off-centre, like this.

So many of these works feel like puzzles or jigsaws, when they do not seem about to take off like kites. And yet none of those comparisons can be taken in any literal sense - for none of the motifs, in fact, look like anything but themselves. I have used terms usually reserved for representational and even illusionistic painting to talk about what is very definitely abstract painting. Partly because there is scarcely a vocabulary for use with abstract work and where there is one, it is often full of wanton obscurity and a deal of ugliness. But partly also because I believe Killeen's paintings relate back to more conventional styles of painting - (styles he has himself, in some cases, used) however much they may at the same time relate forward to his models among contemporary American abstract painters. His is not therefore, the minimalist attempt to 'nudge' unlikely materia into 'art', not that kind of confrontation. Rather he (and Scott) seem to be working from the established middle outwards to the border. And both seem unwilling to let too much go of what worked in the old. Or to put it back in Fried's terminology the important thing is not simply 'interes' but 'conviction' that we can still hope to express something other than the eternal lack in series, of anything to express. So if there is a kind of theatre at work in Killeen's show, it is not that of mere theatricality. These paintings are warm, entertaining, funny in an ironical way. If I have ignored their more formal concerns, it is because it is above all important that we first find a way to relate to any painting, but especially abstract work, in an ordinary involvement, that we and the paintings keep between us an area of human concern. Killeen proves himself adequate to this demand and we can go on to appreciate his wit, his formal control, his in many ways quite outstandingly individual approach, considering the field he is working in and even his national roots - I mean, does it come out of the woolshed?