Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/715572
7 shades and weights are interlocked in restrained tonal relationships. One also notes here the mastery of touch in the artist's judicious painted interventions, and his sensitivity to the inherent nature of material: a less is more approach resulting from a keen awareness of the power of understatement. Amongst works from the 1960s in this show are a dozen from Blackburn's Summer Series (1969). In this context these pictures – most especially the two canvases – stand out for their clarity of shape and surface flatness, comparable to that of hard-edged painting of the period in which they were made. Blackburn has said that the forms in this series were initially inspired by Dali, a painter he does not otherwise much admire: the Spanish artist's melting forms are, he declares: 'where the purely abstract meets what we see as reality.' Meanwhile, in what amounts to a key statement, Blackburn describes the soft forms of the Summer Series as: 'beautifully abstract; but they also lead the mind to things we engage with in everyday reality.' In the works on paper from the Summer Series the mood, though not necessarily serene, is gentle, the preponderance of blues suggesting sky and water. But although their stacked abutted shapes might read as allusions to landscape they are as much as anything about the body. This applies particularly to the two canvases, in which pallid balloon- like forms nestle sculpturally. They are neither carnal nor erotic, but speak instead of protection and love, reflecting a particularly intense period in the artist's life. In this exhibition the theme of man's irresolvable conflict between good and evil is most clearly evident in the panels of Diptych (Battle), its horizontal strata reading as a ravaged landscape. Embedded within the densely clotted whites along the painting's lower edge are hundreds of tiny ball bearings and a cluster of six-inch upholstery needles, there as though to fend off one's passage through the ascending mire. Beyond is a sea of jostling brushstrokes, pitched in right-leaning diagonals, in whites over blacks over greys, Diptych (Battle), 2014/15 Summer Series A, 1969 (Re-worked 2003)