Gordon Walters 'Koru Study: White/Grey/Yellow/Black'

At first glance, Koru Study simply seems what its title promises: a study, homework and revision (and, interestingly, when you notice the double dates, the final version we have here was a product of ‘re-visiting’). It may seem cold, unyielding and mathematical as though it began as a rigorous exercise (in four colours with three tiers) executed with sang-froid and deliberation to avoid emotion and provoke effortless feeling. At first glance, too, the work seems all surface and hard edge. It is only when you stand in front of the composition and give yourself time, when you stop thinking and start looking carefully, that you notice the oddity, and most certainly this is what attracted Sue and Francis to this particular work. There are two anomalies: why two grey koru bands and not three like the other parts of the composition? And, even more mysterious, what is the strange vertiginous rectangle that rises up the right hand side from the grey koru band as if somehow it shouldn’t be there? The vertigo gives the composition a nervous texture.

Like much of the best parts of Walters’ work this strange motif has its origins in the small gouaches he produced in the 1950s. As he declared: ‘My method of working has always been to go back over all my studies and re-work them so that some of the preliminary work at present on hand is actually an idea from the late 50’s or early 60’s which will have gone through repeated revisions. When I look at it, I found that the 50’s gave me sufficient ideas to develop throughout the next twenty years and I have only taken up a few of them.’ It was in fact Francis Pound who first confronted this problem and put names to many of the motifs Walters used, describing and cataloguing them in his 2004 publication Walters En Abyme: spirals, en abymes, divisions, stripes, constructions, interlocks, windows, wobbles, rauponga, tessellations, transparencies.

The motif we find here is a version of ‘the hanging rectangle’. A non-centred rectangle left dangling in space. Here, of course, ‘revised’, it shoots upward rather than hangs down. Pound uses strong, almost violent, language to describe these unexpected features: they are ‘sudden spasms’, ‘paroxysms’, ‘convulsive gestures’. Walters revelled in the mischief of shapes that can be made to jump out of their skins and perform in unexpected ways. For all their implied sense of order, his geometric compositions are discovered structures, rather than imposed designs. It is always important to stress they continuously transcend their sources and become visually dynamic accretions made up of ambiguities, ruptures, shifts and unities. As MOMA’s chief curator of painting, Kirk Varnedoe, once avowed, ‘Abstract art is propelled by this hope and hunger. It reflects the urge to push toward the limit, to colonise the borderland around the opening to nothingness, where the land has not been settled, where the new has emerged.’

As the rich ambiguity in Walters’ Study for Koru unfolds so, too, does the evidence that the artist is concerned with a poetics as much as a geometrics. He is, of course, fascinated by the sort of rules and mathematics that come from science, but he is also spellbound by what Varnedoe describes as ‘the borderland around the opening to nothingness’.

Laurence Simmons