EVENTS

24th Sep 2011 to 15th Oct 2011

View Shadows and Reflections

On entering this stunning exhibition of new work by John Kingsley the viewer will find their eye drawn to an extraordinary and sensual landscape image titled Dusk at Gourdon. It is a large painting, near-abstract in its combination of colour and line and form, but evidently a panorama of the valley beneath the picturesque Provencal village. The sky is bathed in the colours of sunset, a soft pink, cerise and coral; while the mountains and valley floor have their subtle greens speckled by shades of sienna, rose and magenta. It is a perfect evocation of the gentle, breathtaking beauty of sunset.

Look closer and the ingenious nature of the painting will reveal itself. The central, foreground, motif is a rocky promontory, a viewpoint that leads the eye into the composition. Deep in the valley the trace of a winding road creates a ribbon of movement between the rounded hillsides. The promontory is a substantial and material form; perhaps an echo of Georges Seurat’s celebrated Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp painted in Normandy during1885. While the valley and road is more ethereal; for all the world a reminiscence of George Henry’s renowned Galloway Landscape of 1889. But the ethos of this painting moves beyond the association with these two Post-impressionist masters and, perhaps, lies with an even more celebrated precursor. Paul Cézanne once remarked that ‘the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its conscience’. Here, that greatest of all Post-impressionist painters recognised that creative landscape painting was not a notation or depiction of topography, but the recording of sensations within the painter. This has been Kingsley’s desire in creating this image for it is surely a meditation on the impression, the feeling, and the wonder of experiencing landscape.

These qualities are extended into those images that are more scenic, especially the paintings of villages in south-west France and the parallel works that focus on the rural hamlets in the west of Scotland, notably in Argyll. The fascination with colour is most evident in the summer paintings from the south of France. Here, village squares gather the intense sunlight and are fractured into patterns of shadow and light. These patterns, bleached white and dark purple shadows, set against shuttered house facades amongst dappled trees, are like splintered geometries that coalesce into recondite village scenes. These scenes resonate with memories of timeless summer afternoons, but also with the technical experiments of Scottish Colourists like John Duncan Fergusson and Samuel Peploe. And Kingsley, it might be suggested, offers an even more concentrated sense of the emotional power of colour. Of course there is less opportunity for this sensual resonance in the village scenes from Argyll. But here, on the west coast of Scotland, the blue light from the Atlantic offers a cooler spectrum for landscape painting and the hamlets, crofts and steadings squat in a spectacular vista of hill and loch and glen.

Colour is the dominant theme in the landscape and village scenes that populate this exhibition, but the complementary note is the sense of ‘facture’ in these paintings. Each image is created from the build-up of the paint surface such that each composition has a physical and material form. This quality is best exemplified in the extraordinary array of still-life painting. The still-life works eschew the deep perspective of landscape painting and present objects in a shallow pictorial space. Take Objects on a Moroccan Table as an example. The table-top is pushed up into the picture plane, the ellipse of the compotier sits parallel to the surface of the painting, while the two jugs and the vase are presented, conventionally, from a frontal viewpoint. These devices play with our sense of perspective and recognise the complexity of picture making. More than this, they offer the painting as a unique set of balances, harmonies, juxtapositions and configurations. This, wholly modern, approach to still-life painting came, again, from Cézanne and was fully developed by the Cubists in the period after 1907. Kingsley explores these formal and compositional tropes while recognising, also, the material nature of the painted surface. Rather in the manner of that great exponent of still-life painting, the Greenock-born William Scott, Kingsley builds up the painted mark into a rich and earthy texture so that the still-life painting has a profoundly physical quality. In these works, then, the viewer moves from object, to pictorial space, to surface, and back to object in a journey that is both perceptual and conceptual.

John Kingsley’s new exhibition is, evidently, a rich and varied manifesto of extraordinary paintings. It touches upon the technical and formal breakthroughs of the modern period, while offering a kaleidoscope of images that stimulate the intellect and satisfy the senses. Altogether the traverse through this astonishing exhibition of works at the Fraser Gallery will reveal a fascinating vision rooted in a heightened sensory experience.

Tom Normand, HRSA
School of Art History, University of St Andrews

July 2011