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Winston Roeth at Bartha Contemporary, London
14 March -
Review by John Stephens
Portrait in Light 2014 Tempera on dibond
By contrast, Red and Gold, a similarly arranged painting, doesn’t seem to have a void created by the framing device that you can look through into a space beyond. Instead, it’s a field of colour that seems to move forward out of its frame. The subtle shifts, from a bright cadmium to something of a shade of red, are still there after lengthy looking, but it doesn’t have the same feeling of gravity. Here it’s the plane of colour that floats. This might possibly have something to do with the square format of the painting, so there’s no implied ‘bottom or top’. But it might also have something to do with the density of the cadmium red, which doesn’t have the translucency of the blue panel.
Red and Gold 2014 Tempera on dibond
The anomaly in this show, Blue Circle Painting, works differently, although it relies on playing with the same idea of the viewer’s understanding of space and of establishing an aesthetic experience. There are no planes of colour to entice the play of light across the surface. Instead, the two closely concentric blue circles have the effect of simultaneously being incised into the white ground and hovering in front of it. But the more you look, the more the latter sensation takes precedence.
Blue Circle Painting 2005 Tempera on dibond
The fourth piece, Quartet No. 2, is perhaps, by comparison, more complex. Consisting
of four panels of rough-
Quartet no. 2 2014, Tempera on poplar wood
As with the other pieces in the show, the effects of prolonged looking invoked a
sense of doubt in my seeing. I couldn’t be sure that the reds, or indeed the blues,
were the same; there were again the nuanced shifts of light and colour. The pearlescence
played some role in that, as it enhanced what appeared to be the depersonalised application
of the paint. It was just the colour on the sawn wood surface, and then the direction
of cut came into play. There was an inferred bodily movement as if I was resisting
a movement to mirror what was going on in each of paintings in the group, each with
a different response. I believe this may not be an unusual phenomenon, but with
more pictorially complex paintings where there’s more to engage the eye, one is perhaps
less conscious of it. Here, you are very much aware, and I’m minded of the claim
in the exhibition notes that “Roeth creates paintings that reveal the complexities
that underlie the human experience of seeing and our awareness of colour”. I’d go
a little further and add that because of the pared-
With only four pieces taken from the many that Roeth has made over the last decade,
this show makes no concessions to any sense of coherence as a body of work; the more
so as, apart from two, which could be read as a pair, each work is different from
the others. Over the last five decades Roeth’s career has been as an abstract painter
embracing an obviously minimalist or pared-
Without the benefit of seeing the work as a set of ensembles, the show at Bartha
left me contemplating each as a single piece, and that had the effect of focusing
my mind more intensely on what was going on in each of them. Confronted with one
work at a time, I found myself looking for a long time at very little. And I don’t
intend any facetiousness in saying that. The impact of the site-
Framed with a band of mustard yellow paint that is almost like metallic gold, Portrait
in Light offers an experience -
Installation shot, courtesy of Bartha Gallery