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A.D.S. Donaldson is a contemporary Australian Modernist, whose practice engages with the geometric and the abstract. His work is free of ironic quotation and pastiche and cautiously, respectfully continues a tradition of Modernism. In some sense this may be accepted as a refreshing alternative to a saturation of installation and new media art. However, as some art critics have been keen to suggest, Donaldson's art may be viewed also as just another gaup of abstract geometric works in a style where the combinations of colours and shapes are limited. lt is consequently a fine line upon which Donaldson's artistic practice seems hinged, and one that inevitably makes his work quite difficult to sell. This small recent exhibition, at Pestorius's Hamilton house, highlighted such art market issues. The primary focus of the exhibition was a series of offset prints entitled Oranges (2001 ). The series included four square-format prints each composed of a differently sized orange circle set against varying backgrounds of yellow, pink, red and purple. Oranges is suggestive of previous works by the artist which explore the relative effects of two high key colours: a play of colours, highlighted also by Modernists such as Matisse and Cezanne, in which the same colour is not always perceived in exactly the same shade, depending upon how much of it there is and its adjacent colour.
Donaldson's practice belongs to a long modernist tradition of medium specificity, production, and formal experimentation-a tradition that may appear retrograde in this postmodern era of installation and inter-media art. Yet in light of Rosalind Krauss's notion that modernism exists (now and always) through a repetition of itself, and continues by paradoxically reflecting upon its end, the problem