Ian Chandler Exhibition
By Ruth Tuck

The Advertiser, 1968

The Bonython Art Gallery begins its 1968 programme with an exhibition of paintings by the young Adelaide artist Ian Chandler.

These paintings are the banners of a new generation which is emerging in the Australian art world.

As one should expect from this new generation, the subject matter of most of their works is concerned with space-ships and solar winds and mercurial weightlessness.

It seems that the nude body is no longer the artist's stimulus, and his been replaced by the atomic-age machine.

In tuning his attention to this "aero-space industry," Chandler is using his obvious skill in drawing mechanical shapes; cylinders, cones, and cubes in foreshortened groups give an exciting third-dimensional effect.

His colors are bold to match; the bright reds and metallic greys and blacks of machinery are painted with crisp hard edges and careful shading.

No. 12, "Surveyor on Screen" is the most outstanding of this series, with a high standard of workmanship all round, and an exciting sense of form and rhythm.

Chandler is most successful when he relies entirely on his good drawing and hard-edge painting. Hi is less happy with the soft poetic impression. This is evident in No. 13 "Space-frame Landscape" and No. 20 "Transit" with its smudgy atmospheric effects.