ABSTRACT
The discovery of the usefulness of photographs to a special form of realist painting began ten years ago. Richard Artschwager made a series of monochromes in which washes of liquitex, spread across a porous board, built up grainy images of buildings and other subjects, the veracity of which was a cross between newsprint and Daguerre. Malcolm Morleydid several naval subjects in a similar monochrome before beginning in 1965 his fully polychromatic paintings of ocean liners, followed by cabin interiors. Artschwager has continued his monochromatic images, staying close to his initial style, but the work in this exhibition is concentrated on the simulation of colour photography rather than black-and-white. The choice of work presumes an equivocal correlation between the status of painting and the photographic source, which means that Morley's later works, photographically derived but translated in terms of an unruly dark-keyed painterliness, are excluded. What is presented here are the painters of a bright sunlit world or, at least, of bright sunlit photographs.
