Free My Time in Space by Tim Robinson Page B

its vectorial energies are conducted by the corners into the surrounding space, which is really, and not merely conventionally, distinct from the space of the painting. By asserting its limits and orientation the canvas attains its stature as an object in space.
    Beyond that, the present paintings are transcriptions of my own experiences ‘as an object in space’ – specifically, of the freedoms of a solitary walking-tour, of travelling towards the sun or following a map, the purely topographical sensations of seeing a range of hills, approaching it and crossing it.
    A range of paradoxes appears on the horizon; poetic answers to logical questions, the rational solution of problems the posing of which is an irrational act.
    My preferred territory lies between aesthetics and logic.
    Another factor that made these new paintings things in themselves rather than depictions of (abstract) shapes, is that the forms within them were partly outlined and defined by the edges of the canvas. Retrospectively, I see this as the shedding of the last traces of anthropomorphism (teratology, I should say, in view of the Viennese  nightmares), for in the preceding paintings even the purely geometrical elements – circles and the sums or differences of overlapping circles – were shown as if arrested and observed in their interactions; they were protagonists. Paradoxically, this step towards the sculptural led to another, in its way a reversion to the painterly, which was to cut out the forms in board and let them find their bearings and interrelationships on a wider ground, the ground itself This was the internal genesis of the ‘environmental’ artworks of a hundred or more flat pieces I created in the walled garden at Kenwood and in the Camden Arts Centre. In evolving the shapes of these pieces I played around with circular arcs of various radii drawn within a basic square until I found four that formed a geometrical family; because of their internal relationships an indefinite number of theorem-like arrangements can be found when the resultant shapes are laid down next to each other. I incorporated many of these configurations in a drawing which was later turned into a screen print for me by Kelpra Studio. For the real-life version, ‘Four-Colour Theorem’, shown at Kenwood , I scattered the pieces on a smooth lawn as an invitation to direct participation:
    At first they lie at random, a field of colour into which the spectator walks, and then, as people begin to rearrange them and discover their interrelationships , areas of order spread, merge, clash and dissolve. The activity, the building of a landscape, rather than any end-product, is the art form.
    That was the theory as I expressed it at the time in an article for Studio International, and to a degree it worked. Guy Brett wrote:
    Timothy Drever’s are unusual shapes arrived at by simple and logical geometrical decisions, and their colours are unusual too, not merelywholesome primaries. If you move them about on the grass you find that they do not lock together to form any final solution: their ‘order’ is something more tenuous and subliminal (and therefore probably more open to individual invention). I noticed that few people cared to arrange the whole number, and if you stepped back and treated the painting as a spectacle you could see various small areas of decision left by different people.
    Later in that year came the long evening of the first moon-landing , seen on TV as a dreamlike series of unstable and almost incomprehensible black-and-white images. From these visual impressions a new version of the work was born, as I described in an article for the special ‘moon’ number of Miron Grindea’s Adam International Review:
    Lunar paradoxes: one flies towards a symbol of inconstancy, ambiguity and madness, to alight upon a surface of weatherless scientific candour; after the longest voyage one steps from the space-craft into an indoor environment , that of the