Resplendent on Bath’s ever-so-quaint Gay
Street, Bath Contemporary is showing an exhibition of Robert Welch’s paintings.
Travis Riley potters along to the gallery at tourist pace to find out more.
 |
| Creek |
The
gallery spaces of Bath Contemporary, two quirkily shaped, narrow rooms, one
with dado rail and ceiling cornice and the other with skylight, very much fit
in with the Bath aesthetic. The paintings hung on the walls provide immediate
contrast, firmly rooted in a more urban environment, the predominant tone is
grey and they are filled with simple, hard-edged forms.
Welch’s
painting style owes a definite debt to the St Ives School. The simplified
silhouettes and dry, scratchy brush marks of Alfred Wallis combine with the
spare forms and dusty colours of John Wells’ landscapes. Unlike Wells, Welch’s
simplified forms never stray fully into abstraction, and his simplifications
speak more of a desire for emphasis of real world structure, than an intention
to isolate form.
 |
| Power Station |
The
four prongs of Power Station rise up
through a turbid white sky and off the top of the canvas. Smears of grey and
green push horizontally through the painting giving an impression of motion. The
monumental silhouette of the power station appears fleeting. The paint is dry
and scratchy; the brushstrokes are abrupt and protracted.
The perspective in the image finds
us gazing up at the immense building from ground level. The viewpoint implies a
human gaze, and throughout the exhibition the perspective of the eye is
emphasized, whether we are looking down across the fields, or up at tall,
impressive buildings.
 |
| Ochre Curtain |
The
adjacent painting Ochre Curtain shows
an archetypal house, framed on the left by a murky yellow curtain hanging down
the length of the scene. Contrasting with Power
Station, in this image thick, smudgy paint creates a hazy stillness, heightening
the voyeurism implied by the curtain.
Through
the doorway to the right of Ochre Curtain
the eye is drawn to the far end of the long gallery space. A deep red strip
lines the bottom of an otherwise muted canvas (Kingston) creating a pull through into the next room. Mimicking the
turrets of the power station and the jaundiced curtain, the painting employs another
vertical motif. Six white columns stretch the length of the image filling the
foreground. We look past them and up at the ashen silhouette of a looming
industrial building.
 |
| Slate |
The
majority of the images in the show depict these urban (or suburban) scenes,
houses and factories described in uniform muted tones and plain shapes. The
effect, however, is not bleak – in their formal simplicity the images
foreground a fundamental elegance in the ubiquitous patterns of population.
The
grey-tiled roofs of Slate are barely
discernible from the sequence they produce. Isolated from the buildings they
protect, in the pursuit of the formal study, their function has been lost.
 |
| Kingston |
Moving
away from the depiction of urban structures, Day Trip still has a trace of the city. The image in the painting
is framed by the matte grey of a train window. Through the window the countryside
is portrayed as a liquid white sky with geometric fields of molten green and
brown. The paint, which appears as if it is still drying, has a present
quality, contrasting with the toneless grey window frame.
 |
| Day Trip |
The
effect is replicated in Scrub, the
exhibition’s most expressive painting. Green foliage is smeared in loops across
the grey-brown canvas. The result is unavoidably gestural; the marks provide
evidence of a spontaneous scrub of paint that can only have happened over a
short, intense duration. This immediately performative piece betrays a bodily
element that runs throughout the exhibition.
Whilst
the artist’s gaze is held always within the composition of the image, the
artist’s hand also is ever present in the texture of the paint. A gestural
presence and captivation in the subject matter manifests in the dry and
scratchy rock faces (with the white of the canvas showing through) of Creek, the marshy countryside of Day Trip, and the strident green stroke,
formed by a single motion, that pushes through Power Station.
 |
| Scrub |
Travis Riley
Robert Welch, Viewing Form is at Bath Contemporary (Bath, BA2) from 25 January to 8 February.
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