New Work, 1991

  — James Kelman ¹

In John Taylor’s work of recent years the development is fraught with risk. He has concentrated on very particular aspects of the earlier geometric landscapes; areas previously ’empty’ are now occupied and much of the ambiguity is gone. At first came walls and tombs and crosses, charnel-houses, those dark places where the bones of people lie. This derived from an idea “festering away in my mind”, of “the rows and rows of serried stones, all the same standing mute in a barren desert land, a few sharp cacti, a hard metallic blue sky …”. The bulk of this series of paintings were shown in his The View from the Bunker exhibition.

Since then skeletal shapes have formed and assumed life, to a point immediately before death and/or obliteration. The difficulty with attempting an exposition of the new work lies in finding verbs of the necessary subtlety. Taylor is working backwards and forwards, but within that one awful moment of time. It’s a form of temporal movement that splits the tense and ordinary language seems incapable of apprehending it. This might help indicate why such an eerie yet peculiarly intimate feeling pervades the series. Often Taylor uses the same or similar silkscreen composition, then applies watercolour. Thus the same five female figures keep vigil in different pictures, the only change atmospheric, of light and shade. While the women watch the horizon the sixth of their number has fallen, unnoticed; or perhaps unremarked, they have passed beyond the point of return. The horror lies in their sure knowledge of the finality of the moment. They are already in limbo.

Obliteration and occasional revelation. But never reflection. The passivity of Taylor’s figuration seldom allows for that. Nobody can reflect on their own death.

In What Now Little Man the male figure looks inwards, behind him the fiery red explosion occurring he seems to have recognised this, while the space he occupies is already a chamber. In Her Glory the female figure faces the same direction: the moment has come, and gone; in place of the fiery red is an awful, revelatory light. The legs of the upright male in I’ll Protect You are clumsily askew as he attempts to stand over the body of his fallen companion (note the similarity between this composition and the artist’s gouache Figure in Flight, painted back in 1961). In this series, generally, where any hint of activity is disclosed it is from the female figures, the males not so much negative but quiescent. A couple are leaning in She’s the One, the female to our left; the moment has arrived but why do we feel that she’s taken the lead? Compare It’s Now, set in the past where the same couple stand upright, the male figure also to your left, a position which in this context is positive, yet he remains passive.

Aspects of the theme move and remove. A jumble of limbs resembles a large, unwieldy tumbleweed. Groups huddle together, transfixed, caught in time and caught in place. In Lowland Address the group has buried one of their number; in another painting we cannot tell whether the skeletal shapes are figures or shapes scorched in stone. The slightest introduction of new colour resonates like an almighty splash. Be prepared for the lush beauty of Then The Sun Came Out. And in art of this quality, the distinction between ’nude’ and ’naked’ is never rendered more powerfully.

For the past 30 years this artist has imposed severe constraints on himself, working through his own preoccupations, formal and thematic, going with the process, whether in oil, acrylic, watercolour or silkscreen; attempting sculpture, in paper, in bronze – whatever lies within his means and will allow possible development, to realize a different potential. The pre-‘Bunker’ abstracts are usually referred to as landscape yet that sensuousness belongs more to people than geography, and similarly with the marvellous screenprints he produced in the late sixties to early seventies where the displaced parts of abstractions are every bit as human as they are ’envelopes’ or ‘zips’.

But abstractions is always enigmatic and enigma demands contemplation. If little outside reference exists within the work then attention can only be gained by other means, by more formal considerations. This is one reason why folk give up looking. Even titles cause problems in abstract work; they are rarely other than retrospective and too explicit a reference must dissipate the ambiguity, just as too generalised a title may imply the ‘symbolic’. I remember some years ago in a pub with John Taylor, I was muttering away about how I would like to see ‘actual people’ in contemporary painting for a change. Aye, so would I, he said and gave a smile that made me change the subject. For any artist there is only the process and s/he must keep faith with it. There is nothing wrong with more representational forms of art. It’s just that they cannot seem to split the moment; ultimately this means they cannot cope with the present. In an ideal world it is obscenity that is obliterated, not human beings. Taylor’s art is important art, beautiful art.