Free My Time in Space by Tim Robinson Page A

of cities of unworldly purity, whose streets were glittering perspectives between towers that threatened infinity and converged on cold stellar discs. Looking back on them I can see that these intolerably perfect ‘Cities in a Vacuum’ would have been more effective expressions of a derelict human condition without their grotesque and miserable inhabitants. In fact an artist of our acquaintance among the Viennese surrealists told me as much, but I could not accept it at the time. And perhaps there are no shortcuts; one should not counterfeit unity by suppressing conflictual elements. Mercifully, both figures and settings gradually abstractified themselves , turning into energetic coiled forms trapped within or springing free from geometrical constraints.
    Soon after our move to London a way forward opened into a coherent evolution that was to continue for six or seven years. The new paintings were calm and contemplative in tone, abstract but suggestive of astronomical transits and occultations. (I love eclipses. Just as the flow of clouds past sky-places marked by treetops can suddenly arrest one’s attention and indue a self- realization as a localized earth-surface entity, so the grand slow closing and opening of the lunar or solar disc can cast the mind out likea shadow wheeling across the spaces of our sidereal voyage.) The first series of paintings of this new dispensation were entitled ‘The Dreams of Euclid’, and their subtext or sub-imagery concerned the psychology of creativity; these were forms intuited just before they cohered into theorems, mysteries about to be resolved by reason, or (since they could be read as processes glimpsed in their ongoing in either direction) certainties being perturbed, diagrams nodding off into reverie. Some of them were as much as five or six feet square, and a typical example contained one large shape bounded by two compass-drawn arcs with centres separated horizontally by an inch or less, giving an outline just perceptibly broader than a perfect circle. (In the Venn-diagram sense, the shape would be the union of two circles.) The centres themselves were marked by pairs of tiny circles, or paired constellations of circles, of radii equal to their separation, giving a measure of the stress and potential fission of the whole. Later canvases were more complex, with a square array of sixteen or twenty-five circles, touching or overlapping, on which a slightly tilted or distorted grid of the same number of rather smaller circles would be superimposed , the second set being the same hue as the background, so that the crescents and annules left visible of the first set appeared like phases of an eclipse in a contradictory, depthless space.
    In the late summer of 1968 I took myself off to France, not to the streets of Paris where the imagination was still violently asserting its right to power, but to the quiet roads of the Vaucluse and the Camargue, where I walked and hitchhiked, alternately baked and drenched, for a few weeks, and came back with the germs of a new series of paintings. These were square canvases hung from a corner so that one of the diagonals was horizontal. The simplicity of the shapes within them, bounded by circular arcs andstraight lines, seemed dictated by the same urgency of communication as those of road signs. They were shown in an exhibition at the Lisson later that year, for which occasion I wrote this note:
    The boundaries of a rectangular canvas can usually be taken as purely conventional indications of the limits of the artist’s interest in the space he is depicting or creating: on the picture surface a statement is made to which the edges add the phrase ‘and so on’, or ‘nothing of interest beyond here’. By hanging the canvas diamond-wise one transforms the situation; the corners demand attention, the edges assert their reality, and the surprising length of the diagonal is displayed. The canvas acquires a powerful though ambiguous directionality;