Mostly Monochrome

AN INTRIGUING essay included in the catalogue for painter Maria Lalic's latest London show suggests that, when Yves Klein invented his Klein International Blue, he made an unequivocal statement on the centrality of colour to his work, or as the author of the essay, Nicholas de Ville puts it "he proposed to confine, the imaginative power, of painting in the vessel of a pigment".

Mostly Monochrome offers a small but engaging sample of international abstract painters who might be said, to a greater or lesser extent, to hold to this dictum. Although never quite as rigorous as Klein in the restrictions that they place upon themselves, most of these painters appear to believe that there is nothing intrinsic to painting that makes it an unsuitable activity for serious folks at the end of the 20th century.

The work of Sheffield born Lalic proclaims a happy acceptance that the medium it sell, and the very notion of using pigment to make pictures, is burdened with a complex history and a messy set of assumptions about the physical world.

Lalic's modest paintings are almost overburdened by their titles, which systematically name all the colours, from French Ultramarine to Zinc White, used in creating them. Working from a Winsdor and Newton chart of the 18 colours available to 18th and 19th century painters, she builds up layer after layer of pigment until from her precise programme emerges a record of time and action, a fatalistic comment on the modernist enthusiasm for innovation, and even the twinklings of a perplexing side step from it.

Zededee Jones, the youngest painter, is represented by some dower, firmly controlled oil and linen on wood paintings, Marcia Hafif at the other extreme turns in Raspail, a playful, delicately striated, candy pink canvas. Edwina Leapman's work exorcises colour once more, to wander off into waning shades of grey, while Gunter Umberg's untitled minimal dark painting offers a vicious black hole menacing out of all proportion to its tiny size.