Riots of colour explode

By T J McNAMARA

Abstract art belongs to the 20th century but it is not dead yet. It can be wildly energetic, emotional and riotous. It can be poised, balanced, chaste and pure. It can be thin as clouds, soft, visionary and yet intense. As sculpture, it can be solid, monumental and weighty.

All these possibilities are explored this week. The work of Christina Popovici at the Studio of Contemporary Art (until June 4) is charged with energy. In her big paintings she lays down bold areas of colour swept on in passionate gestures. Over this is an intricate play of painterly events.

These are areas of texture and colour, brushed on dry so the paint underneath shows through, extra canvas glued to the surface, drips, splashes and runs sometimes stopped, sometimes allowed to flow. All this inventive technique adds to the energy.

In the past, this artist's work was so uniformly dashing it seemed painted at length and cut off by the yard. Not any longer. The paintings in the Newmarket gallery all have an individual character. Blue Shell of Earth is a storm of blue and white driven by a spectral wind. The Pulse of the Rainbow is a rhythmic arrangement of horizontals suddenly stopped in mid-flight. Another work, Looking for the Right Mirror, is tensioned by severe, stencilled rectangles.

So much happens within the complex personality of each painting that every part of these abstract expressionist works is loaded with ore and, for the most part, they come off splendidly.

There are some dangers. Distances and Surfaces, which gives its name to the exhibition, is a work of considerable splendour but down in the left corner are shiny passages of loose paint at odds with the rest of the surface; a little inspiration that did not work.

Nevertheless, works such as The Highest Flight show a confident assurance that also allows Popovici to do a series of small canvases, Whispery Shadows, that are quiet where the big paintings are a rhetorical shout.

Roy Good returns to Artis Gallery with an exhibition of paintings called Diamond Series, running until June 20. The diamond of the title is a fine symmetrical line that runs through each painting and tensions them into unity.

There are other unities, too: a unity of rectangles, a unity of rich, subdued colour, and a unity of texture that is just enough to save them from any sense of being mechanically contrived. Where the rectangles intersect and overlap are changes of tone and colour that are often unexpected and unusual.

With unframed, irregular, geometric painting such as this the edge is often a problem. Good solves it elegantly. In most, the rectangles are thin panels set out from the wall so the edge does not come into play. Another group of paintings are about 50cm thick and in these the rectangles viewed from the side become blocks of colour, tactile and strong.

One of the most striking of these thicker paintings is called No 8. This painting is built out from an exceptionally fine red. Most of the paintings simply have a number for their title but it is a key to the painter's thinking that the most sombre and severe colour is in a work called For Mantegna and obviously influenced by that stern Renaissance artist.

The poised control over colour is exemplified by the muted blues of Five Squares compared with the stronger, more varied colour of No 20, which develops around an ochre square at the centre. And that diamond. It gains zing and energy by the way its colour mutates as it crosses each rectangular field.

There are no lines or defined forms in the paintings of Valerie Nielsen at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until June 26. In the past her painting has been a multitude of small rectangles, each with a clouded variation on the colour shared by the whole painting.

There is a new audacity in these works. They have only two or three panels and they are larger than before. The shift from one panel to another is a shift in emotion and perception. The colour may be dense, intense and close-up. Then it is matched by a deep vision of pale space that suggests distance.

This is more than a game because these variations in tone suggest not only emotional shifts but also the effects of memory, distance and time. These paintings are how one imagines the skies of once familiar places or, in the case of the red hot paintings, the breath of the earth.

The paintings are enlivened by a delicacy of surface that conveys the movement of a hand. It makes for a classically spare but richly evocative exhibition.

The capacity of abstract forms to express ideas and emotions extends to sculpture. A powerful exhibition in cast iron is by Marte Szirmay at the McPherson Gallery until June 12.

It is called Iron and the works are appropriately rust-coloured and dark brown with a subtle surface conferred by the sand-casting process.

They are plain, rising and descending in simple steps, but can be arranged in a variety of ways to emphasise the symbolic meaning they carry effortlessly.

This strong exhibition enhances Szirmay's long-established reputation.