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MARC VAUX

For over half a century Marc Vaux (born 1932) has shown a long involvement with colour which has led him from flat painting to three-dimensional structures or wall reliefs. Vaux seeks immediacy of expression – total and instant visibility – by distancing himself from any complex images. His work was included in the seminal ‘Situation’ exhibitions of work by British art students between 1960-62 that showed large, impersonal, abstract paintings, in which the message was expressed by their formal qualities alone. Yet Vaux has never adhered to the rules of any group or movement. Freedom in art is one of his governing principles; the only discipline he follows is his own.

Vaux explores through the interaction of different colours in endless combinations and examines the nature of light as an intrinsic dimension of colour. He states that ‘My aim is to release the dynamism and expressive potential of colour in ways that enable the varied effects of light to influence colour and cause it to be registered as an ever changing complex.’ This relates to Matisse’s ambition to preserve the beauty inherent to colour through sensitive organisation, as one might with the tonal quality of music. Vaux recognises that ‘colour is a relative phenomenon’: it can act only in the presence of another colour. The expression of this concept is brought to its apogee in his vast monochrome canvases from the late 60s and early 70s, which envelop the vision and impair our ability to register colour, providing only a small swatch of a different colour palette to restore our vision through relative perception. In other works, Vaux exposes the reflective quality of light by placing bands of colour on the edges of his reliefs, which produce coloured shadows on the luminous white surfaces around them.

A theme that governs the making of all Vaux’s works is the duality of randomness and rational structure. He is captivated by the randomness that is omnipresent in everyday life. In his early work, this manifests itself in contrasting blurred and sharp contours. He has since used computer-generated random numbers (as well as the roll of dice) to dictate the proportion and placement of forms in different works. This means that – in a manner typical of Vaux's style – carefully gradated coloured shapes sit oddly within his geometric compositions. Asymmetry rules surreptitiously. 

Vaux’s early paintings also show a preoccupation with the contrast between expressive and structural brushstrokes, the free and the controlled. Over several decades he developed this into a more anonymous, non-structured and non-representative application of paint. Vaux constantly seeks to avoid conventional ways of seeing, such as the standard precept of horizontal and vertical axes. He prefers to liberate his works from earthbound concepts, in order to make us see them like objects in space (his latest works can be rotated freely). He is also interested in creating indeterminate space in painting, dictated by the uncertain relative location of forms and random arrangement.

There is an unwavering logic underlying the entire scope of Vaux’s work. His style and methods have changed dramatically while his principles have not, which has given rise to an astonishing degree of continuity. He has worked purposefully and intuitively with a careful balance of discipline and openness; and is one of the very few artists who have so thoroughly explored the invariably transformative effects of light on the vision, on surface and on colour.