Gary Collins

Press, 28 August 1986, Page 6

Gary Collins

“Paintings,” recent works by Gary Collins, at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery, until September 5. Reviewed by Pat Unger. Gary Collins, at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery, travels a more signposted road. In eight acrylic works, his emphasis shifts from fastness and colour to the calculated illogic of a pseudo-spatial aura. The first works of this series suggests the Drys-dale-Nolan-Rees intensity of Australia and the latter, post-modernism, in a somewhat Chilcot style. Number 12, “Lyre,” is a work that is thinly and rapidly painted and overtainted in sweeping brushstrokes. Shapes blocked in hurriedly suggest an occluded relationship in a speeding desert atmosphere. "Idyll III,” “Idyll II” and “Counterpoint” are more carefull painted, the

air is stilled and the col-our-tonalities allowed more harmony. The objects remain undefined, resembling pictograms of images rather than the images themselves, as if the artist wishes their symbolic content to stay on the outer edge of visual recall. They combine colour, composition, and visual complexity skilfully. “Idyll IV” and “Antagonist” explore further a post-modern approach. As an art style, some would argue that post-modern-ism is a mere critical fiction or a marketing ploy of the art world or that visual tedium has at last created its own aesthetic. However, what is certain is that its buzz words are “ambiguous-space” and “allusion-object.” Collins plays with these concepts, implicit in the

• theory, faithfully. The colour and brush work are controlled in a > loose sort of way and the . illusory space is strongly neutral. Simple forms waver between two and three dimensions; they are both empty solids and solid fragments of space. They become icons of a personal, primitive view and at the same time, reflections of a mythological universe. Obviously, if logic is set aside, the viewer will see the reason behind it all. These paintings, like • Collins’ previous encaustic works, show his desire to tackle new ideas with enthusiasm. More successful than his encounter with encaustic, Collins finds more fulfilment in the middle ground between semi-abstract space and its lost objects.