黑料不打烊

Stephen Buckley鈥檚 recent work shows a new freedom of form and intensity of colours, building on well over 40 years of exploring and exploding the conventions of the picture frame and format.  He continues to assemble his works starting with the wood battens and canvas fragments which result in surprising and often markedly inventive painted constructions, to which he adds titles that may at times illuminate or, at others, conceal his thinking before, during or actually after making the work in question.  He loves to play with the spectator鈥檚 habit of clue-seeking, for the comfort of connecting intellectually with the visual experience he has created, that is essentially untranslatable into words. As Marco Livingstone wrote at the time of Buckley鈥檚 first retrospective in 1985: 鈥淭here is a mischievous delight bordering on the wilful and perverse in this constant game of hide-and-seek, of revelation and concealment鈥�. Livingstone could have added there that Buckley has shown a remarkable intelligence about the activity of making pictures, an evident pleasure in the manual work of their crafting, an awareness of the histories embedded in art, and often a rich allusiveness to the 20th century canon of Western art in his paintings.