Man may look at the stars but not hear their heavenly music.
IVOR FRANCIS at the Galleries

The Advertiser, 1973

Our mortal inability to materialize immortal visions is expounded by Shakespeare in Lorenzo's speech to Jessica and also, in Ian Chandler's exhibition of hardedge painting at the Society of Arts, entitled, "Earth and Co., Ltd."

At ever-accelerating speed, we hasten our own and our earth's decay by squandering our resources and turning them into waste, in futile belief that, when we have reached the stars by material means, we will find heaven's immortality.

No one knows just who invented the circle, triangle, square, sphere, pyramid, cone and so on thousands of years ago, but Chandler ironically suggests that, with all man's vaunted intelligence, he can add nothing more to these ancient basic tangible symbols of elemental thought when he comes to making thinks, even space machines. All becomes so much decaying earthly geometrical hardware and ironmongery.

The beckoning vision, so magnificently abstractly portrayed in "Thermal," is dismally lost in "Floating Systems" a comment on man's pathetic attempt to achieve everlasting life with metallic bits and pieces in shapes humdrum even to Euclid and Archimedes.

Chandler is a good illusionist; symbolically drab cone, cylinders and tangled pipes seem almost to float off the canvas out into the room from holes cut in the sides of a brilliant red hollow cube.

Entitled "Hexacude" the painting reminds one of the startling kinetic illusionist effects achieved by Vasarely in tapestries displayed at the Bonython three years ago.

Since his last exhibition, Chandler has allowed himself to become something of a propagandist and moralist, with falling-off in the quality of his free, imaginative inventiveness as a consequence.