Joe Tilson

Private Collection, Belgium
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 3rd December 2003, lot 85
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, where acquired by the present owner in February 2005 

Brussels, Galerie HM, 1971 (details untraced);
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans - van Beuningen, Tilson, 23rd November 1973 - 6th January 1974, cat. no.54.

From his first brightly painted wood reliefs of the early 1960s, some arranged as puzzles and others in the form of simplified Ziggurats, Joe Tilson had favoured compartmentalized structures and symmetrically repeated patterns in vibrant hues. Those tendencies find particularly clear expression in this large work made at the end of that decade. Colour charts featured in work produced during the 1960s by various artists associated with Pop Art. They were embraced as a type of found object or ready-made image associated with hardware stores and household paints and as an unpretentious, even openly decorative, compositional response to the grids favoured by geometric abstractionists and Minimalists. By compartmentalizing the flat coloured shapes, Tilson and his fellow artists were able to indulge in complex and ebullient colour harmonies without risking chaotic discord, but also, crucially, without insisting on the subjectivity of their choices, since they were presenting their paintings in the guise of objects they had simply discovered in the world outside.

Such is the case with works such as A Color Chart 1963 or Self-Portrait Next to a Colored Window 1964 by the American painter Jim Dine, who became friendly with Tilson while living in London in the late 1960s, and a series of colour-chart paintings begun in 1966 by the equally celebrated German artist Gerhard Richter, in each of which no two colours were precisely replicated. However flatly painted, however rigorously presented as physical things, there is no mistaking any of these for industrially produced objects; nor indeed, is there any confusing one artist’s work for another’s. For Tilson in particular, the paraphrasing or interpretation of a colour chart – as the modern-day equivalent to a traditional artist’s palette – subtly conveyed the artist’s vision.

Tilson’s preference here for earth hues, which were very soon to dominate the post-Pop work he produced after his move from London to the country in 1972, as well as the subtle insistence on a personal touch in the handling of paint, claim the constituent elements as a personal vocabulary. As in other works by him, the scattering of sculptural letters within these compartments to form the first word of the title sets up a simple tautological relationship between the verbal and purely visual languages employed. Each letter, like each hue, maintains its individual identity while contributing to a visual spectacle that celebrates the sensuality of colour and a delight in the senses.

 Marco Livingstone