TOM CHAMBERLAIN, GILL ORD 'Withheld'

Two artists whose work expands from process and gesture toward a state of simultaneity and for both of whom colour (however delicate) is intrinsic to that articulation. Even as both are abstract artists, Chamberlain's almost invisible layering of repeated washes of homeopathically diluted paint, a memory of a colour triggering something unseen within our colour consciousness, could not on the surface be more different from Ord's bold signature swipes and the definitive drama of her colour fields. However the repeated gesture, one lapidary and swimming in time, the other graphic and wandering through space, share a moment caught somewhere in the meshes of light or line. The edges of Ord's canvases are the limits of a viewfinder shifting across a landscape, seeking the message or the map buried within the knot of calligraphic curves. Chamberlain's are more discreet - the edge of the canvas is the point at which we turn when pacing a room, waiting. However nothing is actually repeatable, the river cannot be stepped into even once. We can only observe from the banks standing side by side with the artists themselves as something continually escapes capture. Time. The time in the making, sometimes painfully slow in Chamberlain's case; more immediate in Ord's, the memory within the process, mirroring our optical enquiry, raising questions with every layer. Withholding certainty. 'Tous les ans, tous les ans, J’essaierai en choeur d’en donner la note.' Jules Laforgue, 'Lhiver qui vient'