The ghost of Paul Cezanne, so long a resident in the work of Basil Blackshaw, still haunts the Solomon Gallery's two-man show of recent paintings by Blackshaw and Peter Collis. Blackshaw has long ago left behind his hero's tight ranks of tiny modulations, to work instead with broad emanations of colour, even if he retains an attraction towards Cezannelike bold, sudden perspectival shifts. Collis, however, in his landscape and still life images, is still working very much under Cezanne's shadow. The London-born painter's landscapes look remarkably like works by the French artist, save that they tend to feature Irish views, particularly of the coastline at Dalkey. The pictures, with their areas of colour built from matted matchstick-sized flickers of paint are well executed, but remain largely inexplicable. Even if a painter can fairly convincingly reproduce Cezanne's style, and then apply it to hilly vistas of south Dublin, why does he?
Blackshaw's work is a more convincing homage to the French painter in that, rather than reproducing his ideas, it develops on, expands, and even explodes them. He has used Cezanne's experimentation as a step on the ladder to his art, rather than the culmination of it. Here, in his Yellow Tractor, a huge machine stalled in a stormy field of greyness, or in the strange dissolving city around Yellow Building, and even in his more typical images of horses and dogs, Blackshaw gives a sense of a painter getting free of a nutritious, but clearly dangerously addictive style.
