Vertical Structure III
1977
Reynolds, Alan
Although from a distance it may look two dimensional, on closer examination, the work clearly inhabits the third dimension. Constructed from cardboard, the artist has stripped everything down to the essentials of form, so that the spectator is able to imbue the work with a meaning which depends on the fall of light and shadow across the work's surface.
A successful landscape painter early in his career, since the late 1960s Alan Reynolds has produced work characterised by rectilinear forms. Reynolds describes his approach as 'disciplined', but 'intuitive' and explains: 'formally I am obsessed with the horizontal and vertical as a structural device' but that he tries 'to give poetic expression through this formal scaffolding'.
Tom Heaven