Nicholas Folland, Malcolm McKinnon, Ian Chandler
Greenaway Art Gallery

Ian Chandler has always obliged by providing extended notes on his paintings. This exhibition was no exception. The six paintings, supported by a video (which was a collaborative project involving the artist and his son Brett) were explained sufficiently to introduce viewers to the fact that Chandler's work has remained fixed on global issues to do with pollution and rampant materialism. Not that it was immediately evident on entry.

His distinctive style of building images from successive overlays of calligraphic lines, sourced from line illustrations or templates (such as bank notes or flags) created images of old-fashioned aesthetic beauty. They looked optimistic and benign until closer inspection revealed ominous elements such as the tanks and crossed guns which composed some of the attractive infills in Moa Zedong & Deng Xiaoping which summoned the spectre of the rise of the East and fall of the West. The same point could be better make by Leaning Tower of Pisa, a vertical canvas carrying the image of the Tower seen through a veil of cascading fountains. The artist's notes indicate that for him the Tower symbolized the tottering Western world. In also referring to the acid rain which continues to add to the building's destruction, other works, particularly the video with its seamless panorama of traffic-clogged highways and a work titled Futurism 1909-1999, were drawn into the equation.

In the appealing configurations of the tracery of car forms lay a reminder of the love affair with the machine which beguiled the Futurists so long ago and the obsession with speed and access which, in the artist's perspective, bedevils the world today. In this company, other works, particularly Mahatma, Ganesha & Dharma Chakra, sat uneasily. On one hand, positioned in the gallery space opposite a strident reminder of Chinese national aspirations, the image offered a reminder of Indian world power contention. But the image, in its interwoven complexities and symbolic marriage of ancient beliefs and recent political history communicated a sense of negotiation with the possible and perhaps inevitable.

Chandler remains an uncompromising and committed painter. The ironies which inform his style of commentary continue to demand a great deal from anyone seduced by IT into believing that most interesting ideas can be accessed by speed reading training and upgraded browser performance. The 'faster' the world becomes, the more, I suspect, will Chandler's work demand that the viewer, slow down and lose some time within his mesmeric mazes.