A sense of the Romantic was in the air recently in the works of Ballard and Ohlsson. Ballard's landscapes displayed a psychological, moody aspect, while Ohlsson's were gentle fantasies or peaceful, domestic "vignettes".
Ballard, who is English and now lives in Paris, has chosen to re-examine in a post-structuralist sense, the genre of English landscape painting, producing large oils and smaller pastel drawings.
One might well query his use of the now unusual motif of the realistic English landscape. The issue of appropriation is not at the centre of these works for they are of no one specific artist. Rather, they might be seen as Ballard's sensing the end of post-modernism by escaping into a world of romantic and poetic sensation.
With a previous background in abstract art Ballard's drawings are a contemporary, critical examination of the landscape genre produced from experimental inversions of traditional practice.
For us, the viewers, an initial surprise is the format in his tree and hay bale drawings. Ballard submits the landscape to a contemporary discipline by narrowing the format with minimalist, rectangular slades overlaid at the sides. The artist inverts/ overturns the width associated with English landscape painting.
In the hay bale drawings the format balloons out at the top into a "T" formation, creating a sense of imbalance and oppression.
By the elongation of his drawings, he insists we read the work as a "vista". Our eye wanders through subtly blended charcoal and pastel "incidents", rather as we are meant to meander visually through Chinese paintings.
However, it is in his tree drawings that the artist subverts the rules of the picturesque, for three quarters of the way visually into the work, the
Richard Ballard, Untitled, 1988. Courtesy Milburn + Arté
