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David Taborn had his first exhibition as Fellow in Fine Art at the University Art Gallery eighteen months ago. The paintings shown on that occasion were full of energy and promise, exactly those qualities which ought to characterise an inaugural exhibition, but because they had all been taken from the preceding six-year period, when circumstances had not always favoured the natural development of the work, they sometimes reflected a fragmented working pattern. By securing the award of the Fellowship, the artist gained a much needed period of freedom from other commitments, enabling him to devote his undivided attention to painting. The work in the present exhibition is the outcome of this period of sustained concentration.

The inaugural exhibition, like any retrospective, marked the end of a phase of activity, and the most immediate problem at the beginning of the tenure was to establish a starting point which would also build on what had already been achieved. This continuity was provided by Mantle, the earliest painting in this exhibition: the canvas had in fact begun life five years earlier, in 1974, and a succession of different states had already been laid down. These buried levels, though half obliterated, would nevertheless have an influence on any further marks which might be made upon the surface. When in October 1979 work on the painting was recommenced, the presence of concealed channels and ledges began to determine the form of the linear structure which gradually emerged. This linear configuration, bent and pulled into its final shape, serves as a structural armature, but it might also be read as a cable embedded in the paint surface passing a current of energy around the whole field of the painting, the visual tension increased by a succession of pressure points and breaks in the circuit. In the painting as a whole, swirling opulent colour works against a tough, impenetrable and hide-like surface.

Mantle was finally completed on the last day of 1979. Its linear structure suggested the starting point of several smaller canvases. These began from calligraphic skeletons of hooked and scroll-like forms, but because this was the reverse of the procedure adopted in Mantle, these imposed frameworks were never much more than artificial structuring devices, and only traces of them remain in the final paintings. Instead of a linear structure, the paint is applied in small dabs or patches across the whole surface. The influence of submerge structures or unseen currents is sometimes hinted at in the rhythmic ordering of the individual elements (ie Loup No 11), but more often the arrangement is simply an all-over distribution of colour particles. This method of applying paint stresses an insistent physicality, the surface gradually building up through the accumulation of small individual touches. Because of the analogies with various organic and geomorphological processes which are inevitable suggested, the paintings do have an evocative quality, and they also have a decorative aspect with their compacted colours and richly textured surfaces.

Concluding this series of small scale paintings is Chine, a more ambitious 6ft x 3ft upright canvas. In spite of the increase in scale, the surface continues to be built up by the slow accumulation of small elements; in places the individual strokes are threaded together as if to suggest a discontinuous mesh, but the organisation of the picture surface is established by the overall tonality, with its contrasting areas of darkness and luminosity. The capacity of a densely woven surface of pigment to generate passages of light and space, together with the portentous door-like format, gives Chine a mysterious quality.

A change in direction was inevitable after Chine: a particular approach had been taken as far as it could go, but to continue to adhere to it would have resulted merely in the reiteration of a formula. All the subsequent paintings are therefore broader in technique. but there is more behind the change than simply the artist's reaction against an approach suddenly in danger of appearing facile; the reaction is against the whole tendency of the recent work, with its unified all-over effects, its decorative and evocative potential and its very accessibility. All the elements are now called into question; the result is a move towards more astringent colour, towards asymmetry, towards the wilful introduction of eccentric forms and harsh, even deliberately uningratiating effects. This is evident in Fohn, a 6ft square canvas completed during the early autumn of 1980 (although the preparatory drawing No 10, weaving together myriad tiny touches of charcoal and pastel, still indicates the continuity of the earlier preoccupations). The painting takes up those qualities of light and space already evident in Chine and amplifies them: the light is harsh, the space deep and turbulent. Against this ground forms seem to drift, dissolve or calcify. Grooves scored in the paint surface indicate the traces of linear elements; they do not imply structure but serve to emphasis disintegration.

Chimera is taken even further, a painting whose energies seem to turn destructively in upon itself, and where rich colour is overwhelmed by dry and sandy pigment whipped across the surface, Two passages provide a key to the overall mood: a dark invasive, viscous mass fans out into the painting from the bottom edge, and, at the top, a cluster of greens and silvers opens up a clear interval of space. threatened on every side by encroaching forms. It is not just the painter's determination to avoid those easy lyrical effects too often associated with painterly abstraction in Europe that compels him to bring out in the painting an irritative and abrasive quality, but something more difficult to describe: the attempt to find in pictorial form the counterpart to a particular kind of experience.

Chimera takes an extreme position; nothing quite so intransigent comes after it. Ichor may have its visceral aspect, but the general impression is altogether lighter and more buoyant. Technically it was accomplished quickly and directly, the colour no longer churning up the surface but suggesting the existence of spaces beyond the picture plane. This painting provides a link with the work in the most recent phase, where one of the main concerns has been to extend the investigation of pictorial space.

In this past phase, several different approaches are followed. There is a further group of small canvases, but drawing, using a wide variety of media, also plays an important part. Particular mention might be made of the adoption of the monotype process, often used as a starting point for drawings that in turn relate to some aspect of the painting. In several of these studies, receding planes are woven from stacked, folded or interlacing forms; in others, patterns and constellations of surface masks set up oppositions between flowing and obstructed spaces. Many of the ideas worked out in isoloaton in the smaller studies are fed into the large composition, which forms the centre of the whole group. This painting, Swordtail Enclosure, gathers together many of the themes explored during the recent moths, and it might be seen as the exhibition's climactic work. in it, rich colours are running across a turbulent undertow; twisted skeins of paint are woven into great tides and fluctuating currents, with the suggestion of toothed reefs and concealed traps beneath the surface.

Nicholas Alfrey

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