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Playing with illusions. The Advertiser, Metro 1973 The paintings by Adelaide artist Ian Chandler, exhibited at Ray Hughes' Gallery, communicate a sense of the industrial scientific age. Chandler achieves this with inventive constructions (which are no literal counterpart to the external world), with color schemes of dead steely greys whose chill is emphasised by bright colors, and by a modernist "hard" treatment, which includes use of templets, ruling and abolishment of brush stroke. Chandler's craftsmanship is meticulous and painstaking. What he seems to enjoy most is playing the illusional game. Geometric forms, such as beams, tubes, bolts, cones, etc., lie over the surface, tumble forth eye-deceivingly, from spaces, just our from flatness, swing around, defy the law of gravity as if existing in out space. Three-dimensional illusions are often made more complex by the employment of shaped canvases, as in "Hexacube," where the hexagonal canvas is contradicted by the illusion of a tilted cube. Behind Chandler's cool treatment and emphasis on formal consideration one senses nevertheless, his involvement. One guesses he loves, hates and fears all at once. Occasionally, he expresses himself quite explicitly, as in "Idol," which is an ikon of the robot made of hard metal.
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