Student art display

Press, 27 October 1982, Page 31

Student art display

Paintings and Drawings by Bianca Van Rangelrooy and Peter Clifford; at the Canterbury Society of Arts until October 31. Reviewed by John Hurrell.

These two young painters are displaying their final submissions for the new Bachelor of Fine Arts degree course, so their work can be evaluated by their teachers and by the public. Bianca Van Rangelrooy's paintings are distinguished by an adventurous experimentation with pieces of translucent tissue paper stretched and tightly suspended on fishing line. Many are attached to frames, or in front of shallow boxes, and some hang freely, like kites.

The stretched paper has a lovely skin-like quality,’ and is coloured with acrylic and oil glazes, or with calligraphic patterns in ink. Unfortunately the scale of many works is inappropriately small for the type of loose gestural painting used, while the supporting frames interfere with, rather than

enhance, the shapes they con--tain. In many cases, too much is attempted at once, so that the projected shapes are not given a chance to interact clearly with the forms on the backdrop behind them, or to reveal new relationships to the moving viewer.

Peter Clifford’s canvas works are also hampered by their scale, but work better as an installation of six paintings in a row, rather than individually. These not overly ambitious works emphasise the sensual properties of thickly smeared oil paint, contrasting surface qualities such as palette knife versus brush application. These paintings embody painterly values introduced to this country in the late 1950 s — in 1982, they look dated and facile. Referred to as a “Passage,” each painting is simple in composition, containing a centrally positioned vertical rectangle. This hints at a confined space which the artist must travel through. The best of these

suggests conversing figures in a dingy corridor, silhouetted in the light from a distant doorway.

The fact that each student is committed to showing a certain quantity of figure drawing to satisfy course requirements destroys much of the thematic unity of this exhibition, because they are not used as a basis for the paintings. The greater range of possibilities for painterly research would there fore indicate more personal commitment to whatever area the artist chooses. One would assume that after four years, students would have the confidence and ability to present a wellconsidered cohesive body of paintings, that was thoroughly professional in its presentation. When the work shown contains some elementary deficiencies and is still nervously tentative, it appears more as a comment on the nature of the guidance they have been receiving, rather than on the abilities of the students themselves.