FINE ART: Ivor Powell
I AM assured that it is coincidental, or maybe serendipitous, that Geoffrey Armstrong’s exhibition The Tree should have opened at the Newtown Galleries within a week of Edoardo Villa’s Trees at the Goodman Galley. Nor is it hard to believe that this is the case: beyond the accident of the title, the two exhibitions have absolutely nothing in common with each other.
In Villa’s exhibition, the title is deployed as a kind of conceit. There is not much beyond the titles in any of Villa’s sometimes totemistic and sometimes mechanomorphic metal constructions to suggest any such interpretation. The basic play of form is between cylindrical and what can only be described as mammary shapes; most of the works are symmetrical in their execution and only the most glancing reference is made to arboreality in that some of them could be said to grow out of “trunks”.
But, of course, such literal-mindedness misses the point. It is in the metaphorical extension of the tree, in its evocation of growth principles and an apperception of life, that the sense of what Villa is doing begins to emerge. And when played off against the familiar formal paradox in Villa’s work between the overtly sensual and biomorphic on one hand and the mechanical and industrial on the other, a certain philosophical sparking does take place and a real presence is achieved.
If Villa’s evocation of the tree in his exhibition is oblique, Geoffrey Armstrong’s is nothing if not direct. Though he has cheated a little, bringing in orphaned swatches of twigs and a couple of other unrelated bits, what he has on exhibition is, essentially, a tree.
Not just a tree, though. While keeping the basic form of the original blue-gum as laid out on the floor, Armstrong has dismembered it, sliced whole sections into rounds of about a pancake’s thickness, split others into longitudinal sections, made little trees out of sections of the big tree, and so on.
On one level it is a Magaliesberg chainsaw massacre — there is something inescapably possessed, even maniacal, about the way that Armstrong in recent years has been attacking great chunks of wood to turn them into sculpture. Everything that happens in turning the wood into sculpture happens in the act of confronting the material with the tool; it is action sculpture in exactly the same sense that Jackson Pollock made action
But this is not all there is to it. Armstrong has described this body of work as a confrontation between, on the one hand, his Western formalist training and the pre-eminently technological tool of the chainsaw, and on the other, the organic material of the wood. Most artists would sound overblown and pompous saying this, but you can feel it happening in Armstrong’s work.
As somebody remarked at the opening, it’s the kind of work that deserves more than just its own exhibition.
Edoardo Villa’s Trees runs at the Goodman Gallery until February 4; Geoffrey Armstrong’s The Tree is on view at the Newtown Galleries until February 18