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From: Ben Zanoe Category: Art Date: 03 March 2009 Time: 04:39 PM Review: Any attempt to puncture the confounded insolence of St.Ives seems to be ill fated, the idea that this western outpost of post war modernism has ever had a sincere heart is often levelled but seldom, if ever unanimously admitted, as if there were not proof enough in the blatant manouvering of a gold-digging giggalo claiming love at first sight... again. For the Tate St.Ives to present this touring show of Ben Nicholson's work's there is a peculiar juxtaposition of meanings in motion, on the face of it, the exhibition is faultless, although Tate S.I. don't seem as exuberant about it's homecoming, it belongs there not because of the false airs of the Tate St.Ives preferences, their idea of "fun" purchases or their po-faced attitude towards anyone who is'nt a heterosexual family of three point five, or their emulsion paint charts or the geyser powered fountains of self righteous patronage instilled in the faces of retired Midland volunteers tip-toeing around their cathedral of taste. Ben Nicholson's work contrasts the St.Ives he expressly portrays, a place he came to live in as a young man with his artist wife Barbara Hepworth, a place that bore it's overwhelming sense of identity down through Nicholson's English middle class sensibilities until the saturation point mutilated any remaining urge to pick over his father's lex non scripta, yielding finally to an orgasmic sensuous delight in graphite against gesso sottile, graphite scraffitto surging like a rush of blood to the ears, as his urges went forth from the nieve music of a rustic Cumbrian landscape and became further and further condensed into lines, geometrically balanced surfaces and tonal variations. That St.Ives, a fishing boat bilge suffused town where the GWR railway lines occasionally took freight, where shipwrights occupied the beach, mining was still undertaken along the coast and the industrial infrastructure of the Hayle estuary dominated the prospective, that this tar flavoured town could bend such a delicately sensitized faculty is not so surprising, as the eye lingers on panel or canvas there is a sense that the rendering is the aftermath of an arousal and a sublimation. A sense that this artist who came to St.Ives with another erased artist - Christopher Wood and who met with Alfred Wallis - the souvenir mainstay of Tate St,Ives seems to have been impolitely but discretely coughed away during conversation. There is the Hepworth Garden, part of the Tate empire but the eye, no matter how jaded or new, could not be convinced about the curational ambiguity of this presentation, at the exhibitions end there is a loud raspberry of Tate Corp mercenary geurilla warfare where the napalm of nepotism blasts the colours of the grandson of Sir Terry Frost of Limington Spa, artist in residence into the forfront, (a democratic process no doubt) a parting gift in the name of something that will forever change allegiance. Is it then, better to have failed in authentic oblivion or to succeed with appropriated pride? I urge immediate viewing of this much sought after locall.