What the hell is Peter Lynch playing at? Look at these paintings. Look at them, for Christ's sake. Colours direct from the Fab Fabrics back catalogue, laid on with all the subtlety of an apprentice plasterer on his first day. Time was when painting was a fine art, its well-wrought eloquence lifting the spirits and opening horizons. But this? This is like Mondrian with Alzheimer's, de Stael on acid.
Mondrian: now he did know a thing or two about the complicated business of putting paint on canvas. That whole de Stijl and Neo-Plasticism kick must have been something else, the immaculate conception of innocent dreamers. Imagine those earnest visionaries believing in the revolutionary power of geometry and primary colours. Draft a few crisp, bright rectangles, fence them in with some neat black lines, leave the rest white and - hot damn! - instant utopia, universal harmony. But do you think Mondrian really fell for that scam, swallowed its formulaic recipe hook line and sinker? No way. Check the evidence. He was really toiling with that paint. While he tried to coax and tease it into obedient conformity, it rebelled at every turn. While he was saying yes to the luminous efficiency of precision, it was saying no. He knew that in the torrid relationship with paint, paint will cheat on you every time. There's pain in paint, as they say.
If it was tough then, it's even tougher now. At least the messianic Masters of Modernism could still chase the dream of utopia; still believe that once their art had fulfilled its redemptive destiny, it could die peacefully, mission accomplished. We, on the other hand, are condemned to address an altogether different kind of Final Solution. Once the word "Auschwitz" appeared, language dried into a hard shell of hollow signs. Art didn't expire in glory, it was condemned to a living death. In the aftermath of this catastrophe it's hard for the painter not to produce mere pictures of paintings. Hard, but not impossible.
The search will, inevitably, turn up a few dead ends. The chic allure of spot and spin paintings, for example, along with elegantly poured puddles and sheets of enamel paint. Dead ends because they elevate tasteful neutrality to a point of dumb closure, coaxing paint to perform a few easy tricks like an eager, nervous puppy. Knowing pastiches smoothly rescued from the remnants of abstraction: Dead ends because they narcissistically admire the improbability of their own condition. All of them works which say, "I don't know what I want, but I don't want it anyway." All of them pictures of paintings, professions of bad faith.
"You don't really believe," asks an astonished Gerhard Richter, "that just the dumb showing of brush strokes, of the rhetoric of painting and its elements, could accomplish something, say something, express some kind of yearning for lost qualities, for a better world; for the opposite of misery and hopelessness?"
You can't dump progressive optimism and badly-behaved paint at the same time and still hope to have something interesting left. No chance. You've got to let them fight it out and witness the agonised tangles they produce. When Peter Lynch referees the contest it seems at first as if he is letting them get away with anything. Those colours and those brush strokes look like strictly illegal moves. But then you start to realise that new rules of engagement are emerging, a new game is being invented before your eyes. Or perhaps it's an old one which has passed you by until now.
Have you ever watched a sport whose laws you didn't know, whose tactic’s you couldn’t fathom ? It's a bit like listening to a language you have never heard before. You know it must make sense to someone, but not to you. The players are deep in concentration, euphoric or dejected by turns, but the meaning of their passion is lost on you. It seems to be passion for its own sake, pure passion, but you know from other experience that there must be more. Mustn't there? It's time to look at Peter Lynch’s paintings again.
John Calcutt. April 2000