OLIVER BEVAN

TEXTS

Go to INTRODUCTION to the PLAY catalogue by Nicholas Usherwood

Go to Article by Oliver Bevan for the WITNESSES AND DREAMERS catalogue

Go to Article by Oliver Bevan for the SUBJECTIVE CITY catalogue

Go to Article by Sophie Bastide-Foltz for exhibition "Sur l'eau" at the Galerie de l'Ancien Courrier

Go to article by Alexandra Bourre for catalogue 'Oliver Bevan' 2007

Go to Confession by Oliver Bevan

INTRODUCTION to the URBAN MIRROR catalogue

by Mireille Galinou founder of the London Arts Café, a platform for the art of cities

To be a painter is still one of the harshest professions on earth. In many of London's artists' quarters, the garret, scarcity of money, search for recognition, are as real now as they were in the nineteenth century when the idea of the struggling bohemian artist emerged in Europe. So what drives a painter to paint? What can be gained by scrutinising the development of one London based artist? Can a twenty year slice out of an artist's career make us understand better the life of all artists and more importantly, their decision to communicate with us?

Oliver Bevan is a mature, experienced artist based in Hammersmith whose style of painting has undergone dramatic changes. So far his work has produced two main 'mutations': first the switch from early abstract works to a figurative realistic style, and second, the gradual passage from a world governed by built structures to one inhabited by people. On the face of it these changes seem to fly in the face of the steadiness of purpose we have come to expect from committed artists. But there is more to them than meets the eye.

The urban principle

We need not search very long for the single most powerful driving force behind much of Oliver Bevan's output: the city. We should begin by noting the early influence of Mondrian, an artist who sought to create a dialogue with architecture and the urban scene. As early as 1965 Oliver Bevan wanted his paintings 'to exist as objects in a planned environment. In this sense painting could have a similar relationship to architecture and design as pure scientific research has to technology'. With such notions of 'planned environment' and 'architecture' the artist was already very close to the idea of a city.

Conflict

Early on in his career Oliver Bevan also described very clearly how the idea of conflict was central to his work and this has remained a constant feature of his art as may be shown here using the painter's own quotes:

'The work is in the form of a conflict between the certainty of the geometry and the uncertainty of the perceptual mechanism in dealing with it' (1965). A few years later in connection with the 'Farringdon' paintings, he describes the same idea in very graphic terms: 'I treated the canvas like an arena for combat in which I didn't quite know what shape the combat was going to take until I got into it'. In 1993 still the same idea is described in relation to the series of paintings of the Westway: 'I think the flyover conforms to old notions of the sublime. It has a kind of awful beauty. I can't paint anything that doesn't fill me with conflicting feelings.' And yet you will not find pictures of miners' strikes or poll tax riots in the oeuvre of Oliver Bevan and you may even find it hard to detect quickly what the artist means by conflict. Let us take a couple of examples from the pictures illustrated here. At first sight Passengers is a peaceful image: we all recognize the state of reliability and stability that bus travelling affords. Bus passengers rarely look harassed but are mostly resigned to the slow but steady pace of what some have compared to a 'vertical' bath. The two people in the picture conform to this rule. Yet that straightforward experience is undermined by the play of reflections on the window, suggestive of a world of intangibles. That creates tension. But, you may ask, where is the conflict in the delightful carefree painting

Off the Ground showing two girls skipping? Without the explanation of the artist we may never have known....When tackling the theme of children playing in a school yard, (the artists's studio is in a school), he was made deeply aware of the gap between adulthood and childhood, innocence versus knowledge. This is expressed in very physical terms, as is often the case in this artist's work. In a note about the series he writes: 'My own childhood was so unlike most of this, which makes the paintings in one sense a lament for a time I never had and yet in another, a quite scientific observation of the behaviour of young human animals who have not yet learnt to be ashamed of their place in the natural order'. The source of conflict then, is outside the picture, in the painter's head, and the work is able to reach a state of pure, unadulterated joy.

Order

I have a strong wish for a well ordered painting. It seems to me rather like a well tuned engine. It's no good having it burping and farting down the road in the most ridiculous manner.' (1986)

This passionate sense of design keeps the conflict within the pictures in good check. In Exit to Edgware Road the worrying discrepancy in scale between the built environment and its human contingent is softened by the central position of the figures and their harmonious blending with the architecture. The tunnel like structure emphasises the dwarfing size of the tower and the pedestrians' vulnerability, at the same time as the man's right shoulder creates a symmetrical line, a perfect echo of this concrete jungle.

Method of working

Oliver Bevan's method of working was well described by Nicholas Usherwood in an article entitled 'The Artist in Conversation', (The Artist Magazine December 1991). Here we will simply mention his reliance on photography for exploring what is rarely consciously perceived by the eye. A good photograph is distracting to him; it needs to be a bad one. Only then will it reveal the eerie juxtaposition of substance and shadow as in Coming Towards Me, the strange play of lines, and hauntingly, the changing overlay created by the BT icon with the users of a telephone box. But perhaps we should finally return to the idea of conflict. Not only does the artist choose to depict tension by focusing on the strange or transitory in our everyday world, (for instance that brief moment when a passenger surveys the street in Platform), but he is able at times to transcend the source of conflict in which some pictures originated. One Way System, the huge polyptych of traffic, was the outcome of the intense frustration of sitting in a solid traffic jam in Hammersmith. In Oliver Bevan's paintings, the drivers, who had fallen victim to outside circumstances, have turned heroes. They are no longer lost in a frozen sea of cars but their temporarily handicapped journey enabled the artist to see them, perhaps for the first time. He becomes as indiscreet and revealing as the fine director in Fellini's Roma. Similarly, Looking Back is associated with the death of the artist's father. It is gloomy and menacing, filled with that 'awful beauty' but the figure is also emerging from a tunnel, winning through.

The stuff of life is woven into these paintings. The artist's imagery is drawn directly from his environment and bound up with moments of frustration, tension, difficulty. It is also our environment: we have so much to see, discover and learn from the urban scene which has come to dominate the lives of late twentieth century men and women.

Mireille Galinou April 1997

copyright Mireille Galinou and the artist

Catalogue article by Nicholas Usherwood for 'PLAY' :

(Oliver Bevan's solo exhibition at the Royal National Theatre London, March 18 - April 27 2002

Brought up, as we are, on the myth of the artist as someone engaged in a struggle towards meaning in his or her work, it is perhaps rather more interesting, and rewarding, to look at the idea of the activity being more of a process of liberation, more specifically, of liberating what has been internalised over a lifetime, since childhood in truth. Oliver Bevand5 s most recent series of London school-children/playgrounds is an excellent case in point, representing the fusion of two long-standing artistic and emotional concerns; on the one hand twenty years or more of painting subjects drawn from the urban, built environment and, on the other, a complex body of memories and feelings relating to his own childhood and school-life. Here, and for the first time in his painting they come together, to give expression, and.to set free, images of the most striking power and intensity.

His interests in city/urban subject matter can be traced a great deal further back in fact than that point c.1980 when he first started to paint them. In his youth he had had an ambition to become an architect and when, instead, he went to the Royal College of Art (in the early 1960s) to paint, his optical/geometric and, at a slightly later date kinetic work came out of an intense desire, as he put it at the time, for his paintings "to exist as objects in a planned environmentd", in short as objects in a relationship to architecture. Already, too, he had become aware of the way in which the abstract spaces of these paintings could become "an arena of conflict", in this instance taking the form of a conflict between the certainty of the geometry and the uncertainty of the perceptual mechanisms dealing with it.

Later, in the early 60s, with a studio on top of a building overlooking Smithfield Market, which he once vividly described as "like being on the rim of a canyon with tall buildings and narrow streets below" he started "looking at the city as a set of forms and spaces full of manic energy". It was the arena, however, for a more ambiguous, and far more intriguing and ambitious conflict, that of the human feelings and experience such urban settings started to suggest and provoke. And, though empty at first of the human presence, it was not long before, onto this 'stage' provided by the city streets and buildings, traffic and borough engineering projects, people, its inhabitants, quickly started to arrive. "First a pair of legs coming out a pedestrian subway then.. they came right out all over the pavement. The traffic was menacing and the buildings towered over them. I had no political angle, just my sense of being threatened and exhilarated at the same time."

Since then people have come to play an increasingly significant and subtle role in the paintings as Bevan explores people within a variety of urban contexts, most particularly what he terms 'non-personal' spaces - airports, cars in traffic jams and supermarkets for example. In the process Bevan succeeded in imbuing this still largely, and puzzlingly, ignored subject matter with a powerful humanity, developing a rich stream of pictorial imagery which suggested, in turn, that it was still possible, even in an ironic, post-modern world,to create a poetic vision both detached, yet still quietly passionate in character, out of the stuff of everyday life.

Now, with the playground series of paintings shown here (dating from the last 3-4 years), Bevan has, I believe, made another highly significant step forward, adding a new and more intensely personal level of emotional resonance to those human dramas. The starting point for them was a new studio - one of a group of twelve or so that he set up in 1994 on the top floor of Wendell Park Primary School in Shepherds Bush, West London, and used for some four years. To get to this studio it was necessary to pass through the school playground, a routine, almost every day experience that jolted into painterly life a whole body of childhood memories and emotions. He was familiar, too, with the Opie's seminal studies of children's folk-lore, of the separate and distinct (from adult experience) culture of children's games and activities, and of how, in zoological terms they are, at playtime, "wild" for half an hour. Meanwhile, his close and continual observation of their childrend's play also revealed another huge difference to adult behaviour, namely the way in which children, unlike adults, who are generally self-conscious of their personal space and avoid touching each other (something his earlier urban paintings had brought home to him very forcibly, time and again), are in almost continual tactile contact. Girls form groups to dance, play clapping games or skip, boys, racing, fighting and kicking footballs and, more generally, there is a lot of hand-holding. All of this, in turn, however, raised deeper and more disturbing memories and the urgent emotional need to document "a childhood life I hadn't had". It is typical of his artistic generosity of spirit that this expresses itself in the overriding urge he felt in painting them "to celebrate their physical energy and cultural diversity" and it is only in the smaller, more sombre-toned group of works of playgrounds in public parks where the childrend's play (in many cases his own children being the models) is shadowed by the predatory, looming shapes of aircraft coming in to land at Heathrow, that something rather darker-spirited and more disturbing comes into the paintings.

Meanwhile returning to the 'school' subjects, in a big panting like Clapping Song the children, painted larger than life-size, take on a monumental, almost heroic scale which, for all its contemporary immediacy of feeling, conjures up the unmistakable sensation of something much older - The Three Graces of Rubens perhaps or, in its very narrow, frontal space, devoid of any specific architectural location, figures from an antique classical sculptural frieze. Equally in Performance the dramatically massed group of girls suggest something out of a Baroque scene by Caravaggio, the specific reference rather more elusive here but the work itself no less resonant. Then in the smaller paintings - Common Ground or Split Second for example -the quirky placing of the acrobatic, tumbling figures in the mid-ground suggests a detail from one of Bruegheld's great paintings of children at play or even from a Rococo painting of travelling performers - GianDomenico Tiepolo perhaps. In others, such as In Full Swing however, the energy and almost manic exuberance is absolutely of itself, a painting full of such a moving sense of the immediate moment, of this time and this place and no other, that it makes you aware, more than anything else, of the astonishing synthesis of deep personal feeling and subtle artistic understanding that underlies all these works, large and small - in short nothing less than the liberation of feelings internalised over a lifetime made vividly present.

Nicholas Usherwood, editor Galleries Magazine, London 2001

copyright Nicholas Usherwood and the artist

WITNESSES & DREAMERS

Painting the City 

When artists take the city as their theme, it is clear that they consider urban life to be the condition of modern humanity; (the interviews that I recorded with the exhibitors confirm this). If it is true, then to make art about urban experience must be the most urgent, the most important theme for contemporary artists.

 Throughout this century the city has increasingly reached out through the telephone, radio, television, fax, computer, to almost everyone. The raison d'être of the city, the multiplying of human contacts, the rapid interchange of information, can now take place without the superstructure of bricks and mortar in what Lewis Mumford named 'The Etherealised City'. His example of the library system which acts as a network allowing you to borrow a book that may be held hundreds of miles away from your local library, has been superseded by database technology: the police can identify the owner of any vehicle from its registration plates in seconds; directory enquiries can produce any phone number in the country in as short a time.

 There is another dimension, as I argued in the catalogue of 'The Subjective City exhibition: the city is particularly apt analogy for the human mind, because it too is a system of pathways and connections in which certain areas have specialised functions; attractive facades may hide sordid and secretive interiors. In making it the subject of our paintings, we are making images uniquely expressive of ourselves. For some artists, these autobiographical aspects are dominant, while for others a passionate objectivity is crucial.

 Witness

 When the work declares "It was like this", there is a sense in which an artist may be considered a witness, for a witness is more than just an observer.

An observer stands, inactive on the sidelines. So what does it mean to witness? At the heart of it, is a sworn declaration of the truth. It has both legal and religious overtones. if you are bearing 'false witness' dire consequences will ensue. A witness must act. To be a witness is to live dangerously, to risk intimidation, to give a public account of what has been experienced. To make and exhibit a painting is certainly appropriate behaviour for a witness. The risk of censure or censor, of ridicule, of public failure, of an institutional denial of the facts is always present. most artists have a witness within them, courageously swearing a truth which may be unpalatable, in bad taste, of necessity inept in its determination to avoid showy effects. 

City painters at first sight seem to fit the roles of either 'witnesses' or 'dreamers'. In Degas, Sickert or Auerbach, we find evidence. A committed objectivity informs the work. Yet a painting seldom has the authority of an experiment set up in a laboratory. Its very status as substance containing illusory information about other substances makes it dreamlike from the start. To enter the space of painting, is to suspend disbelief, knowing that these characters presented are ghosts, and these locations no more than mirages. The hard facts presented in the form of the photograph, the diagram or the written word seem somehow more reliable. (This too is an illusion, a typical one for the age. Perhaps the sheer weight of paint, the insistence on the painting process evinced by Auerbach and Kossoff is an attempt to recapture this authority). The brush has a life of its own which merely colludes with the conscious intentions of its user, introducing ambiguities, veiled suggestions, where documentary clarity was called for. The Camden Town nudes on their iron bedsteads may well have looked just like that to Sickert, but there is a quality of dream, of unreality about them too.

Dreamers 

Although dreaming is synonymous with fanciful thinking, dreams have their sources and their language in real experiences, playfully recontrived in the brain. Often the illusion of reality is so overwhelming that we wake with hearts pounding or tears flowing. The cities are the product of human brains too, dreamlike, artificial worlds. The dreams of the Oxford spires have their counterparts in every city basking in early summer sunlight. Dreams of freedom attract a shifting population of desperate teenagers to the metropolis to face a nightmare reality of sleeping rough, sexual exploitation, drugs, HIV. Even sober citizens live in fear of mugging, accidental death, execution without provocation by a stranger in a public place. Cities have their theatricality too as settings for the greater and lesser events of history, coronations, garottings, state funerals, firestorms, carnivals, marathons... 

Kirchner, Grosz, Dix and Beckman painted the city as nightmare. And yet that threatening, hallucinatory metropolis was the very real city of Berlin under the Weimar Republic, its cruelties and hypocrisies laid bare. The dream may tell the truth, being less likely to feel constrained by polite behaviour, and when the personal accent has been decoded the truth revealed may be more devastating than the account of the avowedly neutral commentator. The greatest double-act of this kind was surely Goya's. His harrowing war etchings have terse titles such as "I saw this", - as close to testimony under oath as an artist can get. Yet in the black paintings and the caprices he is master of the dream, of the nightmare. The neat distinction between 'Witness' and 'Dreamer' would seem to collapse and and another notion take its place; the idea that artists partake of both characters, albeit in very different proportions. Art is uniquely equipped to present simultaneous contradictions of this kind; a painting may record a split second, as a camera does and at the same time give that moment the gravity and monumentality of a Greek temple. The heavy realism of witnessing may be coupled with the zany atmosphere of a dream. 

Origins of the Exhibition 

My own, first, urban paintings dating from 1982, seemed a strange growth, without precedent in my work and unrelated to the work of most of the artists I knew. Never enthusiastic about isolation, I set about creating some kind of context. I found myself devising and participating in a series of 'city' shows, and became aware of the increasing interest in this genre among artists and the public.

Encouraged by the success of my first touring group exhibition, 'The Subjective City' I decided to build a more focused show, concentrating on the work of nine artists, including myself, for whom a human presence is vital. I wanted to draw attention to a balance struck by each painter between subjective and objective attitudes. The exhibitors, (not all of whom knew each other), represent a community of interest in urban painting rather than a school in the accepted sense. I have visited their studios, selected their work and recorded interviews; edited excerpts from these tapes, revised by the artists, are printed opposite the paintings. 

Acknowledgements

 My thanks go to all the participants for their generosity, both with their work and their time, and particularly to Timothy Hyman for his suggestions and encouragement. I am also greatly indebted to Cynthia Morrison-Bell, Mireille Galinou of the Museum of London and to Terry Bennet of Tullie House, Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery, for their continuous enthusiasm and practical help.

copyright Oliver Bevan 1994

THE SUBJECTIVE CITY

The Subjective City exhibition devised by Oliver Bevan and co-curated with the late Terry Bennett of the Cleveland Gallery Middlesbrough. It toured to:Cooper Gallery Barnsley, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, Theatr Clwyd Mold, and Barbican Arts Centre London

Introductory essay by Oliver Bevan for 'The Subjective City' catalogue1989 

THE CITY - REALISM AND METAPHOR

'The important thing was to look at what was there outside the window, on the asphalt, along the street and down the drain, on the factory floor and in the shipyard, in operating theatres and in brothels, in allotments, in a railway crossing cottage or a contented hovel, along the washing line perspective of a tenement courtyard.

It was in subjects such as these that artists felt they were capturing the flavour of their time, tasting its excesses and its poverty, its prodigality and despair, its revolt and its trivial amusements; the world and its seamy side, undisguised. They saw through it - or thought they did - and loved it; they stigmatised it and were nevertheless totally caught up in it.'

Wieland Schmidt. 1978 catalogue essay 'Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties.

Hayward Gallery Exhibition.

The city is a recurring theme in Western Art, evolving from the fortified place of safety surrounded by an uncertain wilderness in Medieval Italian painting, through the sinister melancholy of Piranesi, the glamour of Canaletto's Venice. the dramatic settings for momentous events in Goya or Daumier to the nineteen twenties. With the rise of the cult of the individual the painted city begins to have a double life.

The picture may celebrate, describe or indict, while acting also as a sounding board for the artist's emotional or symbolic needs. The Oslo paintings of Edvard Munch show hordes of bleached out figures milling along the Karl Johanstrasse, carrying eloquently with them Munch's own personal anguish. A similar quality is present in James Ensor's 'Christ Entering Brussels,' in which the seething city seems to stand for a tumultuous confusion in the painter's own mind. In both of these examples the subjective elements are in a state of balance with descriptive aspects, a balance that was to be tipped over by the appearance of Expressionism in Germany in the build up to the Great War.

After 1918 German painting entered the singular phase which is referred to as New Objectivity, Neue Sachlichkeit. This movement intended to turn its back on Expressionism in favour of a coolly descriptive style which would record the visual facts of everyday life. In practice the major artists of this tendency were swept back into Expressionism by their strong feelings of revulsion for the excesses and cruelty of life in the Weimar Republic. It is worth noting how few art movements of this century have been even remotely interested in the visual facts of everyday life. There are probably more horses than cars in the 20th century art, and if an archaeologist of the future were to rely on the paintings alone, he or she would come up with a completely unrecognisable picture of the present civilisation.

'New Objectivity' and the artists Beckman, Grosz and Dix, not surprisingly, have had more impact on the painters of 'Subjective City' than any other movement. Like the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, we have seen the excesses of Modernism if that term is taken to include a wider faith in the perfectibility of a technological society. The cities of Léger, Delaunay and Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau have not materialised. The exhalations and depredations of our urban civilisation threaten the survival of the planet. The mad, the sad and the desperate are on the streets watching cars as valuable as large houses glide by. Many artists of my generation have broken faith with modernism and turned a searching eye on their own surroundings and circumstances. This preoccupation with the immediate reality of urban life has been largely the province of the photographer during this century. Any painters tackling this subject have been vulnerable to charges of illustration. (Edward Hopper is a case in point.)

Ironically it was precisely photography which opened up new subject matter for the painter, directing attention towards the chaotic energy of the streets. And it was not only the professional photographer who had an influence. In the late eighteen nineties the first snapshot camera came into use, and its accidental cropping of the image certainly affected Degas and Bonnard. This revolutionary subject matter, the painting of modern life was largely abandoned to photography as the Modern Movement got under way, in favour of Still Life, Landscape, Portraits, Myth and Dreams. (That these traditional genres led in many cases to Abstraction does not refute my point, as most forms of abstraction can be traced back to one of them.) The great Realist canvases of Courbet, Daumier, Manet, Seurat and Degas led nowhere as far as the subject matter was concerned, with the exception of Neue Sachlichkeit and in a minor way the Camden Town Group in London. Instead, the harvest was magnificently reaped by the great photographers, Kertesz, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White and Walker Evans amongst others. Their city paintings together with many memorable films of the city like The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks) or La Dolce Vita (Fellini) have probably had as much effect on the artists of The Subjective City as any art movements.

The counter attack on Britain was a long time coming. It coincided with, and was seen as, a symptom of Post Modernism. Narrative Paintings selected by Timothy Hyman for the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the ICA in London, in 1979, demonstrated that while the putative mainstream were photographing floorboards and exhibiting glasses of water, a substantial number of equally ambitious artists were reinstating narration and description as legitimate functions for art. The New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy and The Hard Won Image at the Tate reinforced the point. Even so, relatively few works could be said to be about Modern life in the Neue Sachlichkeit sense.

The Subjective City presents fifteen artists for whom the city is a central concern. The show and its title are chiefly of my own devising, with the help of Michael Downs, Paul Butler who co-directed a pilot show of the same name at the Small Mansion Arts Centre in West London, and Terry Bennett of the Cleveland Gallery who turned a concept into a physical reality. Since my own city paintings began to appear in 1982 I felt the need to make contact with other artists in the same field and to put in context a kind of painting that was not only urban landscape nor the narration of city events, but a combination of those elements with a strongly personal, subjective viewpoint. Over a five year period I located the artists and the work now on view with the intention of creating a show which would communicate both the quality of life in the city itself, and a powerful sense of the intellectual and emotional world of each artist.

The viewer will find some of the canvases highly charged emotionally; there is anger, alienation, humour, paranoia, heroism, celebration, isolation, vulnerability, eroticism. Sometimes conflicting emotions appear simultaneously in the same painting very much as they do in reality. Each artist balances the public and private aspects which make for a sense of looking out at the city to see oneself more clearly, and looking inwards to see the city more clearly. Surely the struggle, the heroism of existing in the world at all which characterises the work of Paul Butler, must have its counterpart at a personal level too. The threatening intrusive quality of Lucile Montague's world, besides being objectively a true description, may also be a kind of private document.

What you are seeing is a compression o the city into concentrated extracts whose power lies in a metaphor. The city is a construction of human minds; it is like the mind itself. Innumerable pathways, blockages, sudden revelations, secret places, wild celebrations, the fall of light in a quiet street, the discovery of torture chambers beneath a respectable town house: these are equally events in the mind or in the city. If the imagery of these paintings moves, disturbs or delights, it is perhaps the result of this affinity between the city and the human mind - the subjective city.

Introduction to Exhibition «Sur l'eau» at the Galerie de l'Ancien Courrier, Montpellier 2006

Water.

That is what you see in Oliver’s latest canvases. The shapes of a few figures here and there, watching the river, or diving into it as though to pierce its mystery, seem incidental. The artist, as we know, having examined the urban environment with an almost scientific eye, a subject which fascinated him, became involved in the study of human behaviour, in particular that of young children skipping in a school yard. Indeed up to this point, I felt that Oliver was telling some kind of story - perhaps his own. But in these, his most recent works, he invites us to enter into a state of contemplation.

The Cèze and the Gardon are undoubtedly his inspiration, but these rivers where I too have passed so many hours, have never seemed to me so physically present, so deep or so luminous as they do in his canvases. Water, as painted by Oliver is primordial, universal, inevitably evoking memories of Monet or Seurat, whose Baignade à Asnières so impressed him. But how can you paint water when you are an admirer of Monet or Seurat? Oliver admits to having needed time, plenty of time to take the plunge, so to speak.

On deeper reflection, I cannot help wondering if his daughters in these paintings are not letting themselves be ‘taken over by the mystery of it all’, as he put it to me the other day. Or is it perhaps the artist himself, who has let go of the world of structured, architectural forms, and of bodies in movement, in favour of an inwardness which speaks of that truth described by the Chinese poet King Hao as: “breath and matter carried to their utmost intensity”?

Despite my admiration for Oliver’s technical mastery and his sensitivity, sometimes to the point of being quite dazzled by them, particularly by the light in his well loved Tuscan landscapes, I often used to feel that I was not quite in touch with his former paintings. But the day that he invited me to the studio to look at his new work, I was enthralled; it was as if I too were diving into the canvas, as if his painted water were suddenly to reveal its secrets. Or maybe I would find myself in the interior world of the artist at a moment when he would divulge some aspect of his personal enigma? In Oliver’s words: “The work speaks of what is going on in my life; superficially it is a visual diary.”

Only superficially however. Even if these new canvases radiate an impression of pure beauty and peace, I believe I can detect in them a certain solitariness, a barely acknowledged need, to get away from human concerns and enter a world of light and shadows, (admirably disposed here), where all desire to dominate fades away and disappears, and where man is only permitted to exist in a state of renunciation and humility, a place which every artist wishing to mark his passage on this earth, must call his home.

Sophie Bastide-Foltz 2006

Water in the City

Perched on the edge of the pool, the small boy relieves his boredom by tracing ephemeral arabesques on the surface of the water. He is unaware of the fountains billowing in the air, like the sails of the boat he would like to have for his game. On the other side of the garden, long jets of water mark out the space. A myriad oblique lines without beginning or end intersect and direct the eye towards the improbable reflections of the gilded railings and the suspended animation of coloured human silhouettes. If the stream of water does not disappear into endless perspectives, it opens up like a giant dahlia. Feeding, as it were, on a bluish spray, the liquid mass rises, loses power, and gains in transparency.

To tell the story of Oliver Bevan’s fountains you must first imagine yourself dogging his steps as he paces the streets and parks. Get under the skin of this artist, (now living in the garrigue*) who also knows how to get the energy of the city into his work. He is as sure footed as his eye is lively, alert, and avid for emotional clues. Like a hunter he seeks out and stalks the passing moment. Then he isolates it, and frames it in his mind, this unexpected vision, uniquely his, until offered to the firstcomer.

In this fountain series Oliver Bevan presents, with increasing acuity, a reality which he has chosen to fragment. From a panoramic view of the Tuileries, to the spurt of a solitary fountain, by way of the mirror-play of the Pyramide, the images of a hidden Paris accumulate, the more secret for being concealed within the obvious. And it is the same for the plunging views of the fountain in Aix-en-Provence, where short, curved lengths of stone form a bowl to hold the minty transparency of cool, bubbling water. Taken separately, even without knowing the places, these disjointed elements are familiar to us. Without the shadow of a doubt. Brought together on the same plane, subject to the laws of a particular composition, these objects seem on the other hand to be escaping us, while even the identity of the places becomes less certain.

The informed spectator, however, still in the wake of the artist, has no doubt over the authenticity of what he is shown. These distilled moments speak to him. They describe feelings he knows well. The atmosphere may become charged with sadness, gentle melancholy, or on the contrary it may fill with intense joy, or quiet serenity. Not only does the subject, the fountain and the city, correspond to each of these emotional states, but more importantly, so does the pictorial treatment of each of these paintings.

If Oliver Bevan favours the oil painting technique of working wet into wet, a process which consists of juxtaposing brushstrokes over a freshly painted ground, without mixing the tones, he knows instinctively when to go beyond the rules and adjust a tonal value or chase and push it still further to invent a new colour. Blends, sudden breaks, sweeping strokes, punctuation marks of pure colour, pigment pulled out as dry as fibre, the possibilities of paint handling are extended to the very limit.

These means match the ambitious scale of the project: to paint the evanescent light diffracted by water, to paint fountains, urban mirrors of our souls, lost at times

© copyright Alexandra Bourre 2007

Confession

During my time as a student in the early sixties I worked very conscientiously from the nude model, determined to master the difficult business of drawing. My painting meanwhile went into a latent state from which it occasionally burst out, most notably in a series of suburban street paintings, more or less realist with expressionist overtones. There followed a loss of direction which lasted almost a year. then a lecture by Peter de Francia on Victor Vasarely galvanised me, not only his paintings but also his polychrome sculptural installations. These thrilled me and the idea that the artist could be a sort of research lab for the architecture and design of the future, struck a chord; architecture had been my first love. The notion of Modernism, which was accepted as normal at the time, was based on the idea of progress, in art as in other things, I saw this new direction ‘Op Art’ as it was not yet called, as a logical extension of the ideas of Malevich, Mondrian and Max Bill, and so threw myself headlong towards it the day after the lecture. It proved to be overall a good career move, especially as I was then one of very few practitioners in the UK, and during the next twelve years the work evolved towards spectator participation - tiles on a magnetic board and kinetics involving electric motors and polarised light. It took a mid life crisis to bring me to my senses. Leaving London for the Canadian prairies to teach painting at the University of Saskatchewan I rubbed shoulders with artists who managed fine without the kind of historical logic which I had imposed on myself. A wonderful woman and a good painter, Mina Forsyth said to me one day : “You’ve got to make your work out of your life Oliver! What else is there?” Words that have rung in my ears over the decades. So I abandoned a successful career as a maker of optical illusions and magical light machines, realising that however well I could devise and execute these things they would never satisfy me. What a relief to be out of the imperious grasp of Modernism. I permitted myself a slow return to representation and a different illusionism, taking for subjects my surroundings and experiences; and so it has continued over three decades.

As an artist I am compelled to perform a balancing act. On one side is the history of art and Western culture. On the other, the private world of dreams, fantasy and and memories. If I topple towards history, the work will be calculating, coldly aware of what should happen next, or a nostalgic reworking of great masters, like Roger Fry redoing Cézanne. If I fall the other way I am in art therapy, or at best surrealism, exploring a personal world of private symbols that cannot be communicated. If I can but hold steady between these two abysses, I just might produce something out of lived experience, tempered by a knowledge of cultural history, something which could be added to that miraculous heap we call art.

Oliver Bevan 2010 ©