ianchandler.org

Anne Ferguson, Victor Dellavia and Ian Chandler
Greenaway Gallery, Rundle St, Kent Town
May 19-June 12

THE UPPER deck, or mezzanine, at the Greenaway Gallery is an unnerving little space and rarely suits work well. Typically, small pieces are crowded there so as to seem still smaller and fussier, or large pieces back one to the railing.

Anne Ferguson currently occupies this space with some bronze sculptures, each being labyrinth or maze (to employ their own title) and which appear rather as the partial walls and ground plans of ancient dwellings. Some are small - for the coffee table - and others are large ~ for the larger gallery, or outdoors. "Portents from the past" is their atmosphere. Ferguson also shows some linoprints.

In the larger spaces downstairs are paintings by Victor Dellavia and Ian Chandler. Dellavia's are dramatically forthright in style yet somehow mute, a style that stamps its foot for attention and, on gaining it, seems, to quote the old detective novel, "troubled at charades". "Guess my meaning,'' they seem so say and, looking at the baroque angels, the constructivist red crosses, the important framing, we say, "Art?"

Some are well done. The angels with propellers I preferred, and Crosses on Forest and Egg Shape on Wood - and some pictures of babies, whose close meaning was unavailable to me but which conveyed affection -
I liked a lot. The flying angels floated giddily about on cleverly burnished and brushed metal which looked very airy, vertiginous and metaphysical - like a 19th century homage to Flight by an academic painter.

Ian Chandler's new works were a surprise to me - art from Underdale for a start! And large and much worked-on and numerous.

Technically they were impressive and unusual and, while propounding no ideas, act as resonators for one's intuitions or feelings about certain areas of development - science and technology developing rapidly and destabilising old concepts of the real and the possible, the return of the East, or of various Easts, as philosophical alternatives and as economic and political realities now demanding a reckoning - thoughts such as these. Obviously it depends what you bring to them. The pictures almost aspire to the condition, as we say, of mural weavings. They have densely interwoven and overlaid planes and skeins of line and color and are extraordinarly vibrant and glowing.

The imagery, which is made complicated by this layering, seems to be of electronic circuitry, scientistic imagery, mandalas, and talismanic primitive presences and totems.

Their presence is heady and warmly pulsating. Chandler's background in '60s hard-edge and retina-oriented painting is well employed in these works: their appearance varies quite noticeably - so that whole motifs and colors appear or recede and do so almost completely, as we view the works from different distances or angles.

The works do not propose ideas but, like aids to contemplation, act to entertain a great many, in a kind of wordless fascination. The '60s impersonality remains but without the brashness or the chill that characterised so much of it.

Chandler's work might be said to invite meaning, while Dellavia's prays for it. Ferguson would seem to tap the side of her nose and nod knowingly. If you feel you have the password, make your way to the Greenaway Gallery.