Keith Richardson-Jones; artist
Hyfler/Rosner
Self-effacing constructive artist
25 April 2005
Geoffrey Keith Henry Richardson-Jones, artist: born
Northampton 27 June 1925; married 1952 Jean Dunlop (one son,
one daughter, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved
1969); died Abergavenny 5 March 2005.
For Keith Richardson-Jones art was not a matter of
self-expression but a fertile dialogue between the artist
and the work: "There's this coming together of what it wants
to do and what I want to do and you have to respect the
outcome of the system . . . It has to be what comes out."
In a conversation with his former teacher and fellow
constructive artist Malcolm Hughes, for an exhibition
catalogue in 1996, he summed up his career:
a trajectory of liberation from mimetic representation,
abstraction devoid of deep conviction, adoption of geometric
form, a passing involvement with "op" colour interaction and
an ultimate settling for space/form relations, theoretically
determined then systematically (rigorously) implemented.
Characteristically concise and self-effacing but, vitally,
he went on to point out the place of intuition in binding
the visual, theoretical and material elements together into
an aesthetic, cohesive whole.
The son of a musician, with Bach a part of daily life, he
was born in 1925; his leaning towards art was encouraged by
Walter Hussey, later Dean of Chichester, but then Canon at
St Matthew's Church, Northampton, where he commissioned the
Henry Moore Madonna and Child and Graham Sutherland's Christ
on the Cross.
As a student at the Royal Academy Schools, Richardson-Jones
balked at life drawing but the exercise of copying Trajan
Roman letter-forms and their spacing laid foundations for
later developing a visual vocabulary of spatially related,
"concrete", geometric forms. Progressively he set aside
imitation and abstraction in favour of invention, and in
1964 began to construct monochrome, geometric reliefs. His
work moved between relief and painting and, from 1969 into
the 1970s, he experimented with the additional dimensions of
colour with the same objective rigour, positioning each
colour on a notional three-dimensional map according to its
hue, its lightness or darkness, and its density or
saturation.
The evolution of Mondrian's work, van Doesburg's "vocabulary
of geometric form" and Richard Paul Lohse's construction
with colour sequences were valuable precursors, but so was
much earlier painting, Giotto especially; and architecture
and music would be equally influential. He visited Florence
as much for Brunelleschi as for Piero della Francesca, and
Prague, armed with a list of buildings which needed to be
seen and photographed. His own work he thought of as
architectonic and felt in tune with the phrase "chamber
architecture", coined by that other maker of geometric
reliefs Mary Martin.
The structures of music, from Bach to Schoenberg's atonal
procedures, with their inversions and reflections, provided
further confirmation of the path he was taking, jazz also
played its part, and hearing Steve Reich's Drumming at the
Hayward Gallery in 1972 coincided with his own move towards
seriality. At first he used linear progressions based on
numerical sequences, then expanded them into planar
relationships, and finally set about exploring the points at
which dissimilar sequences coincide.
By this stage he was back to working predominantly on white
reliefs, using light and shadow to divide a given format,
perhaps by an arithmetical progression of additions, and
then dividing its pair by fractions. Each divide might be
signalled simply by a groove and the coincidence of
divisions in the two panels by the darker shadow of a groove
of double depth.
A piece made in 1988, Imperial/Metric: 50/127, comprises two
conjoined panels, one marked off in centimetres, the other
in inches. (Aptly it is owned by Lohse's daughter.) Its
length is determined by the two scales finally coinciding at
50in and 127cm. There is satisfaction and amusement in its
eventual, Anglo-European resolution, and wit in its likeness
to an all-white piano keyboard whose keys don't quite meet
until the very end. And wit there was, constantly belying
the apparent intellectual austerity of constructive art.
David Saunders, who taught with him at Derby and Newport
Colleges of Art in the Sixties, recalled in his funeral
address an artist with strong Dadaist tendencies, who for
months, on boards of various sizes, fiddled with the
positioning of a filthy, tattered gym-shoe until he achieved
a proportion and configuration that satisfied him.
During the early Sixties Richardson-Jones involved himself
closely with the activities of the Signals Gallery, a
pioneer in the field of kinetic art with links to Europe and
South America, and exhibited there in 1966 in Soundings
Three. He was given one-person exhibitions at the Lisson
Gallery in 1970, at Oriel, Cardiff in 1977, and a 25-year
retrospective at three galleries in Wales in 1996. But
beyond these he valued the creative and critical
companionship he found in exhibiting and conversing with
older and younger constructive artists, both in Britain and
in Europe, and through teaching.
In 1965 Richardson-Jones and David Saunders, in the wake of
the Coldstream Report, moved to Newport College of Art,
where they joined up with another constructive artist,
Jeffrey Steele, in developing innovative techniques and
methods, not least in exploring the interaction between art
and music.
Teaching and living in Derbyshire and South Wales, as he
chose to do, could have been isolating, and it was only with
the 1978 Arts Council exhibition Constructive Context, where
he showed with 14 other artists that he felt finally
accepted as a contributor to British constructive art. He
participated in Répères in Paris and Forum Konkrete Kunst in
Erfurt, and from 1984 to 1989 he was an active participant
in Exhibiting Space, London, a forum for exhibition,
collaboration and debate which also opened up association
with musicians such as Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton and
John White.
The culmination of that project was the exhibition "Testing
the System" in 1996 and the subsequent colloquium "Patterns
of Connection" the following year, both at Kettle's Yard.
The deaths of his co-exhibitors and London hosts, Malcolm
Hughes and Jean Spencer, within months of those events, were
shattering blows and were followed by serious illness which
abruptly ended his career.
Dialogue, discretion, and an unwillingness to impose were at
the heart of the work and the man. He leaves a distinguished
body of work whose keynote, in its maturity, is one of
reconciliation:
that's what an artist's craft is: reconciling those two
elements, the cerebral and the felt, in a single work. It
was the same for Bach, it would even be the same for an
abstract expressionist.
Michael Harrison