Julian Lethbridge

OKAY = America!

Gestural abstraction as all-over is quintessentially American painting. To say this might cause unease or even alarm in the current, arguably most chauvinistic period in our nation's history for many decades - were it not for the fact that the artist I am going to talk about was born in Ceylon and grew up in Britain. This means that he has been a New Yorker since 1972, which makes his, Julian Lethbridge's, story a typically American - and that means: successful - story of immigration. Aside from the native-born American population, "we" all came from somewhere for different reasons at different times, miraculously weaving together, varying and marbling the culture of this country. In general, the rubric of "all-over-American-type-painting" covers a broad spectrum of post-1950 art - it is certainly a broader arc than was intended by Clement Greenberg, the creator of the term - ranging from Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning to Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. The common denominator lies hidden in the working principle that the amalgam of signs, which evokes a more or less representational or poetic appearance - sometimes, as in Johns' work, this results in an entirely prosaic one - stands for itself as an image. (...)
The visual and tactile density of the largest of these (more recent) pictures is nothing like what we have seen in Lethbridge's earlier works. Perhaps they mark a turning point in his work, which until now has been subject to continuous, step-by-step change. For the moment, however, I am content to take Lethbridge's current pictures for what they are, rather than interpreting them as portents of things to come. Expressive of an instinctively restrained sensibility that is as thoughtful as it is disciplined, but - in a wholly unapologetic manner - hedonistic, his canvases overwhelm and entice with a sophistication that is both mesmerising and easily accessible to those with the requisite combination of patience and desire. On the whole, and in the long run, these paintings are machines in constant motion, their whirring dynamism signalling that All-over-American-type painting is a far from finished parenthesis in the history of modern art - that is, a work in progress. (Excerpt from the text by Robert Storr)