The moment of "white light" is the moment of perception ... It is the seminal brilliance of perception - that blind vision of unconscious intelligibility, never seen nor known except as unknowable, which makes a work of art real. (Jack Chambers)
This is the first time that the 'so-called' silver paintings of Jack Chambers have been reassembled in forty years (I like it when things are actually labeled 'so-called': it's like something out of Lewis Carroll or a piece of Marxist anthropology from the 1930s). They are displayed alongside his film works, appropriately enough since he referred to them in explicitly cinematic terms as 'instant movies'. They developed at a crucial period in his short career, a time when he was stylistically restless and momentarily breaking from the strictures of the classical European tradition of academic painting which he had been steeped in. They are not, however, casually experimental, but probing. Nor are they a flirtation with techniques that were in the air, but rather a deeply skeptical analysis of the medium that he would continue for several years before devoting himself to what he dubbed 'perceptual realism'. This context is important on a number of levels. As he sought a truly localized art, he reacted against the colonial tradition in both of its modes, as either the influence on style exported from Europe or, perhaps more immanently dangerous, that exported from south of the border. He was also gradually stripping the medium to what he regarded as essential – the image – in what was, to a substantial degree, a polemical attack on the direction painting had gone in since the second world war.
