What is presented in the group of works shown in the current exhibition is a world of fluctuating order, of patterns that form and reform without the consolation of a dominant logic. Kidner has rightly pointed out that he is not living in the world of Mondrian, whose horizontals and verticals betokened a securely established visual order, ultimately linked to the rational constructions of perspective. He might probably have more sympathy with Malevich, who once compared the perspectival vision to that of a cow shut in her stall, and launched himself into the pursuit of a visual metaphor for infinity. But Kidner is not satisfied with metaphors of infinity either. He chooses the pentagon as his basic structure because, unlike the square, it is constitutionally unstable and liable to take you to the brink of visual anarchy. But he also uses it to prefigure organic and sub-organic forms that have a place, however lowly and degraded, in the human habitat: dynamic forms such as swimming mosquito larvae and whirling particles of dust. Curiously, these are not viewed in any adversarial way, as they would be perhaps through the microscope of a biochemist, or the professional eye of an ecologist. The chance that the microscopic world might be unexpectedly benign is indeed conveyed in the witty title: Love is a virus from Outer Space. All of this work draws still on Kidner’s voracious interest in the invisible; as well as the visible world. But, of course, as an artist he is fundamentally committed to visibility. He has a passionate concern for structure, which here results in the most unexpected of all architectural models: a joyful collection of ‘Hill Top Villas’ that snatches some kind of natural ebullience and provisional stability from the jaws of defeat. Look carefully at his ‘Dandelions’, and you will observe a system being built up from remarkably banal and colourless little units. It is the contrast between this deconstructive view and the expansive charm of the objects in their wholeness that gives the experiment pointedness and wit. I should finally return to a thought that supplements my earlier reference to the society of the Renaissance. One of the most original ventures of the art historian Erwin Panofsky was his great essay on ‘Gothic architecture and Scholasticism’. Panofsky was evidently intrigued by the apparent parallels between the development of the medieval cathedral and the great systems of thought devised by medieval scholastic philosophers. To put it crudely, while the philosophers overreached themselves and abandoned the ideal of constraining all knowledge of the natural world within the system of thought known as a ‘Summa’, the masons built vaults that reached higher and higher until they finally fell down. But before this simultaneous collapse, Panofsky argues, it can be observed that the structures of thought and the structures of architecture are obeying the same kind of logic. What is fundamentally held in common between them is the principle of manifestatlo: that is, the making manifest in visual terms of a logic believed to be implicit in the structure of the human environment. What is so impressive about Kidner’s work is that he never abandons the idea of manifestatio. He continues to track down what most artists have long ago decided to abandon: a realism based not on concepts or likenesses, but on the myriad intersections of forces that structure the natural world. Stephen Bann