Oils success on large canvases
Ivor Francis reviews art exhibitions

The Advertiser, 26th May 1976

It is unusual to find an artist painting large hardedge canvases in oils instead of acrylics.

The style involves the use of masking tape for its clean-cut color separations, an operation difficult to carry out with slow-drying oils.

That Ian Chandler at the Contemporary Art Society dares to attempt it is justified by his success and the brilliance and richness of color resulting from a transparent luminosity which only oils produce.

Yet he leaves no trace of uneven coverage throughout extensive pure, untinted areas, which hardedge abstract painters aim to avoid by using easily brushed-on acrylics.

Chandler has abandoned his former representational motifs. His "Color Structure" paintings are composed of forms in the shape of abstract solids which create their own environment.

He produces a convincing illusion of perspective in "Structure No. 7" where, as it were, he makes it seem possible to walk right into the picture, starting from the dark, green-brown patch in the bottom right-hand foreground to the seemingly distant grey L-shape area at the top.