Reviewed by William Feaver
June 19 1977
Anthony Stokes Ltd., a new gallery in Langley Court, Covent Garden, has opened with a nice display of painting procedures and mannerisms by Colin Crumplin. He has taken the gestures of large-scale, impasto-mad, acrylic abstraction and reduced them to step by step demonstration models. On tiny canvases, random blobs are doubled over, to create squashed mirror effects, streaked sideways, then copied in painstaking pictorial longhand, then fitted together so that the different areas of spontaneity, pre-determination and copy-cattiness rub shoulders. They are codas of sorts to a style of picture making that, I’m sure, will continue regardless, refusing to declare itself redundant.

BACK |