Paul Caffell Photographer

Mummery & Schnelle London 

Paul Caffell is a British painter, an abstractionist who first exhibited in the 1960s when he was a protege of Roland Penrose, that great supporter of Modernism in Britain after the Second World War. Caffell's last solo shows were in London and Switzerland in the late 1960s, after which he painted privately and concentrated on other creative projects ' notably reinventing platinum printing for photographs, a technique that had died out in the 1920s. His painting has an intimate relationship with music, and here I must declare an interest since I curated the show 'To Become Like Music' in 2008, which was the first public outing for Caffell's painting in 40 years. The painting, like the music that inspires it, is neither immediate in its effects, nor facile. We do not turn to Stockhausen, Roberto Gerhard or Luigi Nono for easy tunes. Caffell's painting makes demands upon its audience that are now unusual, if not altogether forgotten. This is painting that demands time, thought and an interiorised response that, like late-modernist music, eschews narrative in favour of rhetorical experiment. Like late-modernist music, however, this is painting that is made to last, not to be disposed of with the arrival of the next pop sensation. 

The demands and the darkness (in more than one sense) of Caffell's work actually increase with his more recent paintings. On reflection, one of the great benefits of the Mummery & Schnelle show was that it demonstrated the progression of Caffell's painting from the 1960s to the present. The early canvases, with their broader palette and wider range of forms, are almost jaunty at times. Certainly there is about them a lightness as well as a tension between the organic and the mechanical that is perhaps a generic characteristic of British post-war abstraction in modernity's last utopian moment. Already certain of Caffell's techniques are established in these early paintings: the characteristic ridged and furrowed spectra that arc across the field, the calculated variation in the consistency of paint. The more recent paintings are much darker ' often at first sight they are black monochromes that only slowly surrender their subtleties of colour and texture. At times in these works Caffell's fields have an almost metallic sheen to them. In this they have something in common with the work of Ad Reinhardt, one of the inspirations for the young Caffell, but if I could identify two painters as cross-references for Caffell's mature work they would be Philip Guston ' in his Ab Ex phase ' and Therese Oulton. Guston, of course, was one of those American painters who had close relationships with, and was inspired by, late-modernist composers, most notably Morton Feldman, but also the decidedly thornier Stepan Wolpe and Earle Brown. Most people now prefer Guston's bathetic, figurative, narrative paintings of the 1970s to the abstracts, but after three decades of figurative painting that has mistaken bathos for pathos perhaps it is time to rethink what really matters in that oeuvre. Like Oulton's and Guston's abstracts, Caffell's late paintings are characterised by 'slow release'. You realise progressively that these monochromes are far more complex than a quick glance will allow. Citric greens and fiery oranges escape from fissures within the darkness until they come, with time, to dominate the gaze. What looks to be a monochrome, brooding, dark and encoded with meaning only through texture is torn open to reveal a sensate, existential, impassioned interior. Yet those tears are effected with economy: there is no overflow of sensation ' we see just enough. They are accompanied now by a new technique, a kind of writing, the paint scraped through with the fingernail in jagged lines that graph not rational communication but the communing between painter and his medium.