Caulfield storms into the Tate Gallery

by Gwen Herat

From the Gallery, London

Followed by Lowry whose exhibition this season at the Tate Gallery drew thousands of visitors, Patrick Caulfield stormed into take his place at the prestigious Art Gallery in London that had a tremendous response. Britons really love their own painters and look at them with much sentiment and adoration.

The exhibition highlights his innovative approach to colour and composition that Caulfield is known for.

There lies his signature that people at once recognise. They can read him or rather recognise his art even from a distance.

He is an ardent supporter of the idea that things have been done in the most minimal fashion rather than fusing over. In his art I found that man-made things were intriguing rather than sophisticated and a level of visual communication at eye-level. He appears to wallow in urbane imagery as opposed to landscape or nature.

Contortions

The spaces and interiors he sees in real life are more surprising than those that our eyes can invent.

Caulfield always advocated contortions of space as long as they fell in line with his painting. He abhored anything artificial because it becomes surrealism as he believed in some sort of link with reality.

It was easier for me to study his paintings than that of Lowry which I viewed a few days earlier at the Tate.

No one can in reality compete with the unexpectedness that challenges the art scene often. What I like most in his paintings when I keep gazing at them, is his combination of different styles represented in detail and composition.

He subtly combines definitions of interior and exterior that are boldly found in his art.

He finds treating different subjects in different ways and they have become the focal point.

I find it so easy to review his work whereas I struggled to comprehend Lowry.

Sharp focus

Caulfield is easy with his brush and turn around things by simply tapping it. His painting is in sharp focus no matter in what angle you view them, probably because of collaged effect that unwittingly flew from his brush strokes. 'Braque Curtain' painted in 2005 symbolises my theory.

The painting stands out among others as his best; very modern and passionate. It had been purchased by Tate with the assistance from Tate members in 2010, so much for British art, I guess.

Interior scenes portray multi forms and sources of light and shadow and often suggest human presence even if they are not seen in any and that has become his trademark that pushed him to the top in British art. Previously he had painted in flat and linear model and became increasingly involved in areas many other artists would have overlooked.

His sharp eye cuts in and across a picture, that surfaces his mature approach on the canvas.

Thereby, Caulfield defines space and colour in their uniformity. They suggest the depth and allow a sculptural interpretation of pictorial space.

The seasoned art critic has always discovered this side of his rare ability whereas the general viewer may not have such a talent.

Failure

His level of high art was not like Ruben or Valezquez because his visual communication was below their level. But he was determined to pursue his dreams and focussed on frozen quality that led him to interiors. He was not great at portraiture. In fact he was an utter failure on the few he tried. The paintings are flawed and look like fiction and do not exist. He realised where his mistakes were and ceased painting at which he was not adaptable.

Patrick Caulfield was born in 1936 and died in 2005. He reinvigorated the traditional artistic genre such as still life. He could not move over from this genre. After studying at the Royal College of Art, he came into prominence in the mid-1960s and through his participation in The New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

He got involved with pop art but quickly shed its involvement, preferring to see himself as a formal artist working in the traditions of earlier continental painters such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger who influenced his compositions and choice of subject matter.

From the 1960s his paintings are characterised by flat areas of colour with objects defined by simple outlines. But in the 1970s he began combining different artistic styles and creating highly complexed paintings that were definitions of reality and clarity. It shifted towards subject matters to topics in contemporary landscapes.

By now, Caulfield knew where his brush could reach to modernise traditional themes such as still life.

His treatment of raking light was a recall to the American painter Edward Hopper and Caulfield was fascinated by his work.

He was influenced too. The art lovers queueing in the morning sun, is a tribute to their master who has influenced and standardised modern painting.