BIRMINGHAM.- Jesse Bruton is one of the founding artists of Ikon. This exhibition (6 July – 11 September 2016) tells the fascinating story of his artistic development, starting in the 1950s and ending in 1972 when Bruton abandoned painting for painting conservation.

Having studied at the College of Art in Birmingham, Bruton was a lecturer there during the early 1960s, following a scholarship year in Spain and a stint of National Service. He went on to teach at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, 1966-69. He exhibited in a number of group shows in Birmingham, especially at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, and had a solo exhibition at Ikon shortly after the gallery opened to the public in 1965, and again in 1967.

Like many of his contemporaries, Bruton developed an artistic proposition inspired by landscape. Many of his early paintings were of the Welsh mountains and the Pembrokeshire coast. Alive to the aesthetic possibilities of places he visited, he made vivid painterly translations based on a stringent palette of black and white. They reflected his particular interest “in the way things worked, things like valleys, rock formations and rivers ...”

“I wasn’t particularly interested in colour. I wanted to limit the formal language I was using – to work tonally gradating from black to white, leaching out the medium from the paint in order to enhance a variety of textures. I also felt that colour got in the way of describing the structure of the landscape ...

Bruton’s painting Rising Locks (c.1965) epitomises this reductive tendency. Depicting a run of canal locks, it is extraordinary in its allusion to early works by Piet Mondrian, through repetitive, almost cubist, gestures inside an oval shape. And like Mondrian, who had also started with recognisable landscapes, Bruton was engaged in a process of stylistic distillation.

Bruton’s later paintings appear calligraphic, involving white bands meandering across black surfaces, modulated by texture through brushstrokes in different mixtures of medium and pigment. Their titles, such as Winding, Turnabout and Back-up, betray their origins in the long-distance driving he undertook after Corsham, the concentration on the road and the peripheral awareness of other things around.

In a catalogue note Bruton explained they “were about the isolation of that situation. The concentration on the ribbon of the road winding away from you. I am painting about that. The anticipation of what’s ahead – whether one is working in an unknown area and one has consulted a map, or is working in a known stretch. So that, in a sense, one is driving to mind maps.”

Rather than depicting the landscape destinations of a car journey, these works constitute Bruton’s strong desire to embody the experience of the journey itself, their aesthetic restraint more appropriate for the artist’s attempt to convey something essential derived from personal experience.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including text by Jonathan Watkins, Ikon Director.