MICHAEL KIDNER Some years ago, when I wrote in the catalogue for Michael Kidner’s retrospective show at the Serpentine gallery, I suggested a comparison between his working procedures and those which became familiar as a result of the Italian Renaissance. The particular artist whom I mentioned was Paolo Uccello, who was noted by Vasari to have engaged in a passionate study of perspective. Obviously I did not interpret this in the same way as the somewhat biased Vasari, who reproached Uccello for getting too exclusively involved in problems of representing complex geometrical forms, like the torus or rubber ring shape which crops up in so many of his drawings and paintings. I preferred to follow the method of understanding Uccello’s pre- occupation with transforming three dimensions into two which was put forward by the French art theorist, Pierre Francastel. For Francastel, this pursuit of visual transformations was a sign of Uccello’s concern with what might be termed new objects’: as it were, Utopian forms by virtue of which the artists of the new age could express their confidence in the social and cultural patterns that would be their legacy to the future. More recently, at the fine show of British constructive artists that took place in Zurich in 1990, I saw some remarkable works by Kidner that made me alter, or at least amplify my previous judgement. Here were the results of his work with structures that became progressively distended, often using the mesh of elastic materials to map the effect. And indeed there were also exhibits which demonstrated the complete collapse of structures, as they apparently reverting to disorder in obedience to the inexorable forces of gravity. The elaborate meshes formed in the process were, however, strangely reminiscent of the late Gothic vaulting of English cathedrals. I mention English cathedrals specifically here because it is well accepted that the English Decorated style eschews the strict architectural logic of the French gothic vault. Elaborate symmetries and rich rhythms develop which are like visual cadenzas, not completely masking the tectonic structure but certainly indulging the spectator’s delight in serious play. The paintings and constructions that make up the present exhibition are the fruit of an extraordinary new phase in Kidner’s long career. But they are works that still seem to embody a comment on the two earlier stages that I have briefly cited, and perhaps bring them to a kind of mutual complementarity. If there was a problem with conceiving Kidner’s exciting visual transformations as Utopian objects, this was no doubt because Utopianism in its modern incarnation hardly outlived the 1960s. Yet this did not mean that his next move had an exclusively negative side to it - a case of destructive following upon constructive procedures. On the contrary, the collapsing and distended structures seemed to be a way of securing some kind of creative logic in a Distopian climate. Their haphazard beauty still qualified as a mark of confidence in the formative powers of art.