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INTRODUCTION

In the curious Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass world that contemporary art now inhabits, it is amusing to note how regularly the professional trend-spotters miss what is genuinely new and significant. This seems to me more than ever true at the present moment. Partly this blindness has been due to an obsession with what are commonly called 'new media ' - that is to say, with installations, video, the more esoteric manifestations of photography [which is not in fact a 'new medium ' in itself, being more than a hundred and fifty years old], and with aspects of computer digitisation. The important thing that gets left out of this is what artistic media of all kinds, both old and new, are now being used to say.

Post Modernism, for example, has been vigorously debated for more than two decades, without the disputants being able to reach any conclusion concerning how it is to be defined, or what it is in fact really about.

If one looks without blinkers, and also without prejudice, at the artistic production of many countries, one thing that immediately emerges is the fascination now being felt by artists, though not perhaps by critics, with the pre-Modern tradition. One finds both a fascination with the work of certain seminal Old Masters - Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Jacques-Louis David, Ingres, Caspar David Friedrich - and also an interest in the archetypes which recur in Western painting - the Pieta, the Last Supper, the Martyrdom of St Sebastian; but also secular subjects such as Venus Reclining, Danae, the Roman Charity. This fascination expresses itself in sometimes unlikely ways. I am thinking here, for instance, of the videos recently made by the American artist Bill Viola which are subtle interpretations of well-known masterpieces, such as the 'Mocking of Christ ' by Hieronymous Bosch that now hangs in our own National Gallery here in London .

In a broad sense, the work by Stuart Luke Gatherer shown in this exhibition belongs to the tendency I have just described. Its radical quality is only partly concealed by the fact that Gatherer has chosen to be a traditional painter, one very much in love with his craft, obsessed with the effects that can only be achieved through the patient building up of layers of paint on a surface.

When one looks at these paintings, one can have no doubt about either the artist's dedication to his craft or his immensely high level of technical skill. If one is at all educated in the history of painting one will also note numerous references to the art of the past. One of the most obvious is a modern dress paraphrase of Caravaggio's painting 'The Card Sharps', now in the Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth. Hanging on the wall behind the group of card players is a version of the Caravaggio, partly concealed by a curtain. A figure in the background [a self-portrait of the artist] pushes this curtain aside and illuminates the painting with a lamp.

Another ambitious work, 'Danae's Consummation Party ' alludes in a less specific way to a famous painting by Titian, while 'Artist and Model' (In the Pose of Lucretia)' has a very direct link to a painting by an Italian baroque master, Guido Cagnacci, whose work is little known except to specialists.

However, no one could mistake these for imitation Old Masters. They are paintings that belong emphatically to our own world. The figures portrayed are in modern dress, and they rend to belong to a very specific group. They are young urban professionals. The girls, in their simple, smartly cut dresses and trouser-suits, usually black, would seem perfectly at home at a London charity auction or private view. The men sometimes wear open-necked shirts, but often look as if they have come straight from work at a stockbroker's off ice in the city.

Gatherer is sometimes content to use his considerable technical skills simply to depict a type. 'Mobile Man', for instance, focuses our attention on a single figure. The artist is here doing something completely traditional - trying to evoke a personality and a mood. The larger paintings are more ambitious. They contain complex groupings of figures - something which artists are increasingly reluctant to tackle because they no longer have the skill to show more than one or two figures in a space - and they use these groupings to suggest complex but usually ambiguous narratives.

Looking for common themes, one of the first things one notices is how often the attention of the personages seems to be focused on something which is out of the frame. Examples are 'The Arrival', 'The Show (This is Not An Exit)', and 'The Unveiling'. This procedure offers the artist certain benefits. In the first place, it means that the actual subject need not be too specific - the spectator is invited to add something of his or her own. Secondly, it provides an excuse to link the figures visually -they look in one direction and are packed fairly closely together. 'The Show' provides a good example of this method. There are five figures in all. One stands to the extreme right, with his back to us, partly cropped by the frame. The other four all gaze to the left. One, a man, holds a young woman by the elbow, and seems to be trying to restrain her. His other hand rests on the hand of another woman, seated at the table that fills the foreground of the composition. Here too he seems to be urging, or perhaps even enforcing, restraint. This play of arms and hands creates a rhythm that links all the components of the group, all four figures, together. Ancient Greek artists employed similar devices to bind together the various elements in the Panathenaic procession depicted in the Parthenon frieze.

As one looks more closely, one also begins to see that there are ami-classical as well as classical elements in the paintings. For example, if one takes a close look at the tabletops that feature in some of Gatherer's more ambitious compositions, one notices that the perspective is always slightly compressed. In part this is due to the need to reconcile what the human eye expects to see with what a wholly rational, orthodox perspective sys tem demands. It is also a clue to something else. These paintings often seem to me to have an undercurrent of anxiety. The compression of planes reads as a way of conveying a feeling of stress.

Gatherer is doing what gifted artists have always done. He does not imitate the past; he searches the past for ways of expressing his own sense of the present. It is as valid to compare his work with recent videos by Sam Taylor-Wood, often showing your urban professionals of the same sort, as it is to compare it to that of the great painters of the past whom he evokes in some of his compositions. We need both points of reference to understand what he is trying to achieve. Neither comparison detracts from the impressive nature of his achievement.

 

Edward Lucie Smith Art Historian