A FEAST FOR THE EYES: PAINTINGS by ROBERT ORGAN
8th - 27th July 2006 Rook Lane Chapel Author: Edward Phelps
It has been said that the secret of good painting is the balance between spontaneity and control. Bob Organ would seem to have got this balance precisely right. His paintings are admirably ‘ordered' in both the compositional and the tonal aspect, and yet on closer inspection the paint is put down with vigour and something approaching brio. This duality of approach makes any exhibition of his work a deeply satisfying experience.
In terms of content he uses the processes of eating and drinking, letter writing and reading to create canvases that celebrate the impedimenta of domestic life. Carafes, peeled fruit, a crumpled napkin, bread rolls: all seen, these humble things, with an acute eye for their forms and structure – so acute that we are invited through the artist's eye to reassess and re-evaluate them. Organ obviously shares Picasso's view that there is no hierarchy of objects – everything is grist to his visual mill.
For many viewers the colour of these attractive canvases will be a major pleasure. It is gustatory in character – the hues of marzipan, the golden brown of crusts and the greens and ochres of melon all imbue his paintings with agreeable associations that would make owning one of them a perpetual feast.
The one painting in the exhibition devoted to flowers makes one wish he would do more to re-establish this as a serious genre. He bypasses the usual rather sentimental approach, pointing up their strangeness and giving them a gravitas that recalls Fantin Latour. This lack of sentimentality is also evident in his study of an old people's nursing home which does not evade the facts of paralysis and fatigue. It is a detached but compassionate image. Bob organ's accordion players are, I suppose, in the tradition of Watteau's strolling players, melancholy, itinerant figures whose images evoke plaintive tunes like La Vie en Rose and J'attendrai. In one enormous canvas he has combined these figures with one of his set piece expanses of white table cloth and scattered comestibles to create a mood of farewell and adieu - a lovely, elegiac painting – large in scale and intimate in character.
Although completely figurative these images, like all distinguished painting, invite the spectator to contemplate the phenomenon of consciousness, to speculate on what lies beyond the appearances filtered through and engendered by our five senses. How they do that is a mystery, but no less a fact.
Edward Phelps
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