Gillian Ayres and David Bomberg: two painters with markedly different visions of the world, but united in excellence. Interestingly, there is a period of Bomberg’s work — the Spanish paintings of 1929 — when his paint surfaces seem to resemble Ayres’s of the late 1970s and early 1980s in their impacted intensity. But apart from a shared interest and dexterity in paint-handling, in the glorious materiality of the medium, their courses are widely divergent, never more evident than in the extraordinary joyfulness of Ayres’s new paintings. Her current exhibition at Alan Cristea marks a high point in a career dedicated to the celebratory nature of abstract form. Ayres has long been known for her exuberant colour and luscious paintwork, but these new works excel even by her high standards. If ever you needed a lift of the spirits, this is the show to visit.
The imagery is resolutely abstract without being geometric or in any way hard-edged, and has an organic dynamism which speaks of the pulse and growth of the natural world. Here are fan-shapes and explosions like blossom, pods and leaves and flower-shapes, biomorphic forms akin to the early modernist sculptures of Hans Arp. Caves and corridors of richly impastoed colour throb like seams of precious stones, strung with a profligate hand (as if they were beads) on to a painterly architecture which is flat but remarkably solid and satisfying. There is huge energy in the way these paintings — large and small — are made, in the vivid assurance and surge of the paintmarks. Ayres may be in her late seventies, but she paints with the gusto and enthusiasm of youth; only the combination of risk-taking and control betrays the lifetime of experience which nourishes these unique canvases.
A golden harp strung with amethyst, variegated palm fronds white-striped by the sun, a bishop’s mitre filled with cherries — all seen against ‘the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’.
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