T J McNamara: From enchanted forest to cool colours

Lately it has seemed that abstract art is a dead letter but this week shows there are still some valid addresses. Non-representational art still falls into two categories: romantic, wild, gestural, abstract expressionism; and classical, minimal, restrained and abstract.

Neil Frazer, whose works are at the Milford Galleries until November 11, does the wild, romantic bit. His large paintings have a vista framed by two areas of highly charged, thick paint which has been allowed to run, drip and cluster in great lumps.

The central vista is cloudy and the texture lies beneath layers of colour. The areas at the side are complex and applied with an appealing sense of energy. Each painting is keyed to a predominant and a contrasting colour that set the atmosphere.

They all have a magic-forest quality because the paint is clustered in ways as complex as foliage.

The romantic green of Evolution suggests primeval forest but the heavy dark browns of Light Finder and the cream and blue of Time Tracer suggest quite different places and moods.

There is a fairy-tale quality about these handsome works even though nothing in them suggests a specific place or story. Silver Flight suggests a world of snow maidens, but the green of Time and Tide is the enchanted forest the hero must find his way through to find the castle of the sleeping princess.

Yet the romanticism does not conceal a certain hard-driving, unsentimental attitude to the processes of painting. Most abstract expressionism is lyrical but here the layers of paint are driven at the canvas and worked in a way that makes our fingers tingle to participate.

There are audacious things: colour laid over colour, then hacked back to reveal the colour underneath. At times the process of painting itself can become menacing, notably in the dark green and gold of Reason and Desire.

This is a show that has grandeur. Though it is abstract, it is full of ideas and varied in feeling within its set parameters. It goes much further than Frazer's earlier all-over paintings.

The paintings of David Morrison in a show called Ocean at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery are equally consistent but much quieter.

These paintings are minimal abstraction. What has been abstracted from the concept of "ocean" is colour. The reference to water and sea is carried through by the luminosity and transparency of the colour and the way almost imperceptible variations in tone exist below the polished surface of the painting.

Colour is all. The appeal of this painting lies entirely in the viewer's response to colours, each one subtly modulated by underlying textures which give a hint of shimmering sand or changes in tone which suggest slight movement.

The most appealing of the colours are pale blue/grey and rich green which have an intensity denied to identical paintings in brown and pink.

This show demands a response to effects of utmost subtlety which are rewarding only in the context of a white-walled gallery or the long, unbroken walls of minimal architecture.

A problem with minimal abstraction is to get a structure into the work that will give it weight as well as luminescence. Stephen Bambury, whose work is at the Jensen Gallery until November 16, has struggled for years with this problem.

Abstract painting such as his needs a context. The spacious main room at Jensen contains just three paintings: two tiny ones and, across one wall, an exceptionally large work called Walls and Bridges with resin and graphite on three panels.

It has two dark grey areas that thrust in from each side. On these surfaces the graphite has been delicately worked. Then there are two horizontals at the top and bottom connected by a pillar in the centre. These make a giant girder structure. This area is done with resin and gives a completely different surface sensation. It also gives a solemn strength to the work.

In contrast to the impressive size of this work there is, on one side, On a Clear Day, which is two little plates of brass coloured by chemical action and, on the other side, another small work, Angkor, which also has the motif of a vertical between two horizontals.

In the small gallery next door are two more variations on the same themes notable for the delicate, crackled surface in one, Walls and Bridges, and the flooding movement of the resin in another, Angkor.

Cezanne talked about cultivating his "little sensation". These artists cultivate much slighter sensations of texture and movement. It is hard to respond whole-heartedly to such work. Art here on the frontier really needs more force.