'Prints, Constructions’

Press, 19 September 1985, Page 26

'Prints, Constructions’

“Prints and Constructions” by Michael Reed at the Gingko Gallery until October 3. Reviewed by John Hurrell. In the Gingko Gallery Michael Reed presents nine silk-screened prints, four drawings and three threedimensional constructions. The “Twist ’N’ Turn” prints are three sets of screened images, each with three variations in colour. Their tonal range is more pronounced than in his other works, with deeper darks than in his sensual pastel drawings. They are also simpler and more dramatic in their compositions. All of Reed’s works feature tilting planes, either through drawing that uses perspective or shaded hatching, or else in constructed sculptures that use bent and angled cardboard. The prints mix conventional perspective with reversed perspective, where the edge most distant from the viewer is the largest. Some

planes are parallel to the picture plane. The prints show freestanding planes intertwined with floating ribbons. Their colour has more impact than their dramatic shapes, yet Reed’s palette is never predictable. Probably the weakest works in this show are the oldest ones, the pastel and pencil drawings that are similar to what Reed has shown previously. They examine spatial recession and how it is affected by blocks of linear hatching and rhythmic rows of triangles. A couple of these “Interior Motives” suffer from complexity where too much is attempted at once. The overlapping planes cause confusion, like doubly exposed images in a photograph.

In the “Black Echo” constructions, music-like visual rhythms are carefully kept separate, in between two receding angular forms cut out of folded cardboard. One form is stripe patterned on

the left-hand edge, and the other is painted black on the right-hand side. Folded, fragmented lines reveal the planar form in one instance, and real light defines its “echo” in the other.

The construction made of aluminium cannot be framed, as it consists of three narrow forms positioned in a zig-zagging row on the wall. It is an elongated version of the “Black Echo” works. It expands the rhythmic qualities in a horizontally linear direction, through repeating modules.

Although Reed’s prints tend to dominate an exhibition where more of the unusual aluminium works could have been more interesting, this is a worthwhile exhibition. Reed has had more unified and resolved displays than this in the past, but this collection of finely crafted works reveals new directions and interesting changes for the future.