Review for an exhibition at the Royal Academy Schools in 1979
As an artist and a person Raymond Higgs demonstrates the contradictions of dogged independence. The work and life reveal relations between the ideas, perceptions and roles produced by this society and its notions of individual creative freedom. He is disinterested in the history of art and its contemporary practice, but identifies himself totally as an artist. He is passionately involved with science, but has a sense of the world built up of unique, directly perceived primary experiences. He revels in the input to his rural home of electronic communications systems, but in his output delights in ancient media.
Higgs had virtually completed a mainstream academic apprenticeship before enrolling as a student at The Royal Academy Schools and spent his time there and immediately afterwards working in an individual and often isolated way through many of the preoccupation’s and values of the formalist modem academy. The image was tilted to correspond with the vertical picture plane. Colour, composition and finally form were severed from external reference. Picture making became a hunt for shape”, a balancing of ambiguous figure/ground relationships within a shallow pictorial space and an interrogation of the shape of the picture itself. Rectangular works with strong references to their four corners and edges were followed by canvases of other shapes and etchings printed from plates cut or burnt through.
Having reached the point at which the works referred only to their own physical existence and history, he reintroduced external meaning. His art became a means of focusing and understanding his perceptive outside the studio. Many of these concerns are continuous with previous art history but his attitude was much influenced by the objectivity of science which he was now studying.
Many pieces investigate the limits to our perceptions. “The Side of My Nose” plots the field of vision as we focus at different distances. Many make visible in a fixed image, examinable as we choose, phenomena presented to our senses as a sequence of images changing, or normally invisible. In “On Being Observed by a Fly”, our single perception of a short period of time is split up by imagining it through the mosaic eye of a fly into discrete moments which we can look at separately. In “Quadrat the monocultural/growth, reproduction and death of a plant perceivable over fourteen years as isolated images are collapsed into one moment. “Wave-lengths” makes visible the relationship between the wave length and frequency of electro-magnetic waves.
The subject of some works is psychomotor skill. “Circles” takes the classical test of graphical ability and shows how it overlooks human scale. The shapes of circles from the smallest produceable by hand to one greatly exceeding the size of the body are presented for comparison. “Drawing Game” is derived from a game involving the disguise of drawing style. Other works reintroduce spatial questions. The picture plane of Rain on a Window” represents glass on which are painted letters and the trace of fingers in the condensation on the inside of the glass. We see rain and through it a wall. “Train Window” records relative movement at different distances.
This exhibition gives it viewers a first opportunity to look at fifteen years of the independent development of Raymond Higgs’s work, while it gives him an opportunity to consider its social use.
Duncan Smith 1979