Roger Kemp

(1908-1987)

Sequence Fifteen, 1972

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 3 May 2000, lot 16
Corporate collection, Melbourne
Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 7 August 2007, lot 153
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Realities Gallery, Melbourne, c.1975 (label attached verso)
Roger Kemp: Cycles and Directions 1935-1975 - Paintings on Paper: Sequences 1968-1975, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 5 - 30 September 1978; then touring Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla, 9 October - 5 November 1978, cat. 87

LITERATURE
Christopher Heathcote, Roger Kemp: Cycles and Directions 1935-1975, Monash University, Melbourne, 1978 (illus. unpaginated)
Christopher Heathcote, Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 140-141 (illus.)


Dr Christopher Heathcote, author of the monograph The Art of Roger Kemp, discusses Kemp's progressive vision of the 1970s, 'most of his early 1970s works possessed an informal symmetry. Kemp may have improvised in the studio, yet there was an insistent geometry and impulse towards symmetry, the right side of the design inevitably balancing the left. Like the immediate pre-London works there was also a strong sense of structure about the 1970s works, especially the distinctly architectural Sequences. Few of them possessed a strict centre, a focus, although the tectonic configuration was usually so evenly arranged that it was hard to say whether there was a firm top or bottom. This was not unexpected on the sketchpads, for Kemp rotated them and drew from different sides leaving them without a sense of up and down. Sometimes the configuration ran to the edge of the paper as if - lacking borders or framing edges - it is a detail of a visual structure which expands outward two-dimensionally, running left, right, up, down; but it could occur in the large paintings, which were not. In pictorial terms, then, whether one considers a mural-scale painting or a pen-and-ink sketchpad drawing, the abstraction maintains the same energy and visual resolve from one edge to the next. Despite a rigorous flatness that should normally deny the possibility of any depth of field, the pictorial space increasingly conveyed an air of restless cosmic activity.

Perhaps the most surprising quality in Kemp's 1970s work was its facture, the workmanship or graphic technique. Art that is directed by theory is frequently cold and calculated - even vaguely programmatic - and many reductive, geometric works of art are detached. Kemp may have worked to a theory, yet his paintings, drawings and prints seem pure spontaneity. And what most connoted these values was Kemp's line, which was never coarse or hard or guttural. His handling of line was not agitated or distinctly 'expressive'; nor was it ornamental and stylish. His lines were without traces of mannerism, artifice or guile...

The larger paintings had their own distinctive qualities. Kemp unfurled five-foot-wide rolls of paper across the breadth of his studio wall (sometimes he scrolled pieces, and added parallel lengths). Once it was stapled in place, he jotted down a loose compositional drawing with pencil or conté crayon, then reached for his brush and started improvising. Where the late 1960s works had been rigidly gridded, almost choked by geometry, there was an openness and translucency to the post-London compositions: his alphabet of geometric motifs was set in a kind of systematic disarray. The brushstrokes were not as dense or emphatic as before, and there was an optimistic lyricism to the handling of colour. Pearl greys and the white of the paper asserted themselves over his old black scaffolding. Most resolved was the brushwork. Each painting was an arrangement of brushed line - of coloured brushed line - and the chief difference to his drawings being in the use of colour which effectively introduced a layering quality by allowing Kemp to superimpose multiple drawings over each other. There was no 'fill' in his pictures; all we see is the trajectory of his brush travelling up, down, back and forth over the canvas. At moments it seemed to have jumped and leapt about, always leaving the trace of its passage; he did not paint from one side to another, but moved about balancing and maintaining the equilibrium.'1

1. Christopher Heathcote, Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 140-142