Born in Mauritius, Avray Wilson studied Biology at Cambridge University between 1932-5 and it was while involved in this scientific research in 1935, making a painting of a cell structure from under a microscope, that he had his ‘eureka’ moment;
“I drew some of the cells, colouring them with fast running watercolours, overrunning with Chinese ink. The result astounded me. Instead of dead replicas, the forms were bursting with life, looking more living than the cells when alive. From that day my attitude to painting changed… how could a drawing be experienced as more living than life? FAW, 1990.
In his writing “Reminiscences” from 1913, Kandinsky talks about the insubstantiality of the atom and the melting of reality: “one of the main obstacles [on the path to abstraction] was swept away by a scientific event. This was the further division of the atom. The disintegration of the atom was, to my mind, analogous to the entire world. Suddenly the thickest walls collapsed. Everything became insecure… I wouldn’t have been surprised if a stone had melted in mid-air before my eyes and grown invisible.”
Before this it was thought that the world was made of solid things, and the basic building blocks, atoms, were thought to be solid too. Following on from Einstein’s theories of particles and relativity in 1905, the unsettling discovery in 1911, made by Rutherford, was that the atom consisted of mainly empty space… then in the 1950s atomic scientist Oppenheimer declared: ‘The world that is revealed to our senses is only a world of appearances. The world of realty is hidden under the surface of things and this real world can be reached both by the mystic and the scientist, [and I would add, the abstract artist] each in his own way: the mystic by introspection and the denial of his senses and the scientist by mathematics and inductive reasoning [and the artist through intuition and experience].’
In the late forties, the world was being shaped anew, and populations were having to come to terms with the obscene destruction of two World Wars; artists had to work out where they stood and how they could proceed in this wasteland. Many turned to abstraction as a way of trying to make sense of an indeterminate world that had disintegrated on many levels.
It is no coincidence that a common resonance seen to be running through lyrical/informal/expressionist abstract painting in Europe from the ’30s to the ’50s is an intuitive vision of the microcosmic or atomic structure of the world; not just illustrated, but imbued with energy and a bursting vitality, in opposition to the more mathematical approach of geometric abstraction.
“Conjugation”, 1953, oil on canvas, 40x104cm
It was on his travels after the War in 1946 in Paris, that Avary Wilson became exposed to Tachism, or Abstraction Lyrique, the European precursor to Abstract Expressionism. Then, back in London in the 1950s, having decided to devote himself to painting, he became a member of the progressive Free Painters Group, with the like-minded Tachist painter Denis Bowen in 1953. Throughout the 1950’s, Avray Wilson regularly returned to Paris, where he exhibited, and met leading figures such as Hans Hartung, Alfred Manessier, Georges Mathieu and Jean Paul Riopelle. With Bowen, Avray Wilson founded the legendary New Vision Centre Gallery in London in 1956, which promoted lyrical and expressive forms of Abstraction, along with hard-edge geometric. Together they participated in the landmark ‘Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract’ exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1957, which included Lanyon, Wynter, Hilton, Gear and Heath, Davie, Denny, Ayres and Blow all of whom would go on to develop their own paths in response to their experience of the world, both internal and external.
The first thing one is aware of walking into a room full of Avray Wilson’s paintings is the vibrant colour; vibrant in that it appears to be alive and pulsing, even glowing, bringing to mind stained glass or a kaleidoscope. This implies light coming through the paintings, as if they are back lit; but this effect is due to the intensity of the colours used, mostly primaries, and that they are thickly laid on with a knife; but it also has much to do with the strategic use of black. In a lot of the paintings there is a substantial black content, not only in patches or clumps, but as a lining to the other colours. He uses the black to outline and separate the colours, thus enhancing their intensity in the way that the Expressionists did, and as he had practiced in the figurative paintings he had done in 1948; he learned from looking at Rouault and the German Expressionists; “The uses of paint learnt in this figurative expressive phase of the 40’s, rough, impulsive thick and defiantly un-painterly, served me well later.” FAW 1990
“Talisman”, 1954, oil on canvas, 90x68cm
At the door of the Gallery we are greeted by the glowing warmth of ‘Thrusting Reds’ 1959, a red and black piece with the intensity of glowing coals; the thickly laid paint radiates out from the off-centre core, edged either side by arcs and a horizontal thrust on the left. Next to this is the smaller and earlier ‘Talisman’, 1954, with its rotational energy breaking the thick black structure, seeming to spin on a yellow and white patch that is quite central; the thickly painted white areas to the edges of the canvas are dirtied by black and an L shaped area of this mix breaks into the centrality of the painting on the left. A diagonal flash of yellow in the top left area also breaks the black substratum to open out the structure and is reflected at the bottom centre by three bands of multicoloured paint in varying densities. The rotational movement is achieved by wide, long strokes of deep red that cut over the dense black structure. (Compared to it, the later ‘Nucleus’ 1957, on the opposite wall, is of the same size but much more static and makes me think of a furnace with its glowing, central red.)
“Reactive”, 1959, oil on canvas, 198x152cm
The centrepiece of this wall is the large canvas ‘Reactive’ 1959, a shattered tessellation of yellow and blue which merge to form areas of green in the middle and to the top right corner. It appears to be turning and throwing off particles and bending the vertical blue on the left in the process, as bars of colour – yellow, blues and greens – are thrown off, away from the centre.
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In the show there are ten other paintings in vertical formats, some of them extreme, i.e. the height being more than three times the width, and one horizontal one, ‘Conjugation’ from 1953 (image above). There are too many to go into in this piece, but they vary from the very centralised blocky structures of ‘Integrant’, 1953, to the very fluid ‘Vertical in Blues’, 1960. All have the same generous and sensual application of paint that is characteristic of Avary Wilson’s work. As with all complex paintings, these repay the time one puts into them, letting the complexities come to light and the subtleties enrich them… viewing them with what Ehrenzweig called ‘a passive watchfulness’.
‘In aspiring to a vitalistic painting, biology had taught me the key importance of form in the expression of vitality. At profound molecular levels, vitally involved forms could be expressed in complex geometries, indicating that the visible ‘organic’ forms of life had a profound geometric basis.’ FAW 1990
But this geometric basis has to be searched out over time, for it is a ‘soft geometry’ that unfolds as you look and wait. As he put it in the first of his many books, “the artist is a necessary manipulator of resisting matter… he does not ‘see’ the imageries within his inner experience, but must ‘feel’ his way into matter…” FAW ‘Art into Life’, 1958.
