All quotations in this text are from an interview with Jánis Nedéla, 21 July 2002

This final exhibition in Jánis Nedela's Enigma trilogy marks an apparently radical departure from the others. They were built up around the physical and psychological presence of coloured pencils, deployed, dissected and aggregated in textures, patterns and shapes across large surfaces. The new works are even larger paintings, not a single pencil to be seen. Their relationship to the earlier works becomes clear, once one realises that pencils, in themselves, were never the subject of Nedela's work, merely the media. As he put it:

For most of us, whether we are artists or not, pencils are objects of ultimate desire, all those lines of shiny bright rainbow colour in the new box, lying waiting to do our bidding, to make the world as we would wish it to be. If the Enigma trilogy has a subject it is this desire as it unfolds in human destinies. Nedela's primary concerns have always been about code and text, the ways in which we embed meanings and stories in physical objects that can, in one sense at least, come to contain one's whole life, just like a book or diary - objects such as coloured pencils, which invoke memories of intense but unfocussed desires. His interest in the possibilities of art as an infinite, seamless text was sparked by the British artist Tom Phillips. He illuminated a copy of a novel entitled A Human Monument to make A Humument, a work partly composed of the original type and partly of his overpainting, now united in a new text, that covers many copies of the original book.

The pencils were a means towards making art, a way to go at a time when no particular method or critical logic seems to work. As Nedéla says they helped him to make work. The fourteen large pencils he modelled in vinyl for this exhibition Soft Pencils Cat.#40, are not simple large-scale reiterations of an intimate object à la Oldenberg or Magritte. Indeed avant-garde irony had little or no role in their conception. Each was originally intended to carry a term borrowed from critic Suzi Gablik's text, Has Modernism Failed? The fourteen key words are Debate, Discovery, Traditional, Denial, Reactionary, Credibility, Conservative, Acceptance, Stimulate, Bait, New, Progress and Question.

Gablik's central argument is that the ordered logic of modernity, its belief that art can be best understood as an ongoing project, with a clearly traceable history of achievements, led to a failure to make work which addressed the ever changing human condition with any degree of conviction. From now artists would have to improvise work across the whole range of their experience. Intuition and excitement might be forced to stand naked in the studio once more. The key words Nedéla destined for his pencils create a net of dilemmas and possibilities through which the desire to make art might operate in real time, in the studio. Think, literally, of a pencil which draws tradition or reaction as well as colour, which serves to unite the action and the meaning of the moment when the mark is made.

This is a difficult request but it comes close to what Nedéla was after in his new, painted, colour coded text. He was not seeking an immediate congruence between painting and pencil marks, rather a kind of correspondence, in the sense used by the poet Baudelaire, in which experiences, images and words and the marks which make them resonate together to form a new experience. This was not simply a reference to some memory of pencils but to:

The act of making the rhythmical marks, small to minute presences, across Nedela's huge canvases, resembles the progress of a scribe working painstakingly through a sacred text in stone, clay or paper, ignoring irrelevant requirements of consistency and neatness, but making certain that the full presence of the text in memory, meaning and form, is figured ineradicably in each completed page. Nedéla thinks of them as like a page of type but with no right way up. This may explain the overwhelming sense of human presence, of veiled narrative, that the massive triptych, Cat.#41, projects. It is densely present, in the manner of the Rosetta Stone, another enigma whose power far exceeds its content.

The system, the code Nedéla used is clear enough. Each panel uses two of three colours: red, yellow and blue. The background colour of the previous work foregrounds in the next. The three panels are, potentially the first three of a longer series. Think too of his fourteen key words, which colours might have been attached to them. Bands of marks of various diameters, the largest at the centre the smallest at the edges, run horizontally across each panel in loose rhythmical curves, so that one might read them as pages of a vast musical score. Making the marks, Nedéla had no sense of working as if he were using a pencil.

Standing before Cat.#41 one becomes slowly aware of the subtleties, some intentional some completely arbitrary, which have determined its existence. This same dynamic of a consistent human intention through time and chance in every moment that passes lies at the heart of our sense of being human, the ultimate enigma of our every gesture.

Cat.#41

Thus is the presence of the artist, the DNA of the soul, embedded in his work but there are many other layers of code in this text as Nedela's response to a query about his use of the title Enigma revealed.

A portrait in code, a passionate living presence inscribed in a field of coloured dots, may seem strange at first. But why not? Personalities often emerge through the pages of novels, though they can never be found on a single page. Their presence is buried in the code. For the moment Nedela's subjects must remain unidentified, though perhaps, in time, they may be discovered as his texts become easier to read.

Given his concern with intuition, with universal reciprocity, Nedéla makes a surprising number of studies. There is at least one maquette for every large painting. The Maquettes rehearse the procedures, the mantra of actions that will be used for a full size painting. They are very rarely small-scale versions of the finished work. The maquette for Cat.#41, for instance, contains three panels in the same colours but the dots are almost the same size as the full size works, a completely different relationship to the work as a whole.

The studies often have a precise miniature painstaking quality, but this is belied by Nedéla's attitude to them as trial runs.

The studies in this exhibition allow the visitor to trace the evolution of the entire Enigma series as system of signs. In Cat.#60, and Cat.#61 painted nails and flat strips arranged in a Kandinsky-like manner, link the act of making a mark with a coloured pencil to the act of nailing a work or a book together as Nedéla did in some of his earliest book pieces. Nails were amongst the instruments he used to create his latest paintings. In Cat.#90 the panel is encrusted with shavings of enamel from the exterior of a pencil. Cat.#71 is simply a rainbow stack of new pencils. Cat.#75 lays pencil leads on bed of shavings. And so it goes on, each study adds a new dimension to the project as a whole. They are like hieroglyphs, elaborated illuminated letters, that can be assembled in the pages of the book which is the whole Enigma project.

Cat.#60Cat.#61Cat.#90Cat.#71Cat.#75

For instance in Cat.#68, which contains the sawn off tips of pencils, sunk into white paint, pointing vertically outward, their circular images foreshadow the superimposed and off-centre roundels in several of the paintings in Enigma #3. The three panels of Cat.#59 contain a series of variations on the theme of the roundel. In Cat.#101 he develops this idea into an intuitive pattern of roundels of paint of different diameters. Nedéla is working out his sense of the ways in which coloured marks can occupy a space most harmoniously, most seductively to the eye.

Cat.#68Cat.#59Cat.#99

A comparison of these studies with the extraordinarily animated, but perfectly balanced surfaces of the large paintings such as the lush, multicolored Cat.101 (Study for #46), and the sparse blue grey mesh of Cat.#46, infrequently dotted with tiny colored orbs, demonstrates the range of spaces, textual rhythms and harmonies they can achieve. Two of the large vertical works Cat.#46 and Cat.#43 show the extremes of presence that these experiments can reach.

Cat.#101Cat.#46Detail Cat.#46

Detail Cat.#43 Cat.#43

In Cat.#43 a series of roughly equal sized dots in a range of colours, including white, carefully balanced in tone and chroma, so that no simple figure in dots of one colour can leap to the eye, are set up in a rough grid. The colours are also sequenced in a half-intuitive, half-systemic manner so that no clear sequence emerges yet the surface as a whole appears far from random. It is an exquisite product of consistent human intention and the continuous pressure of chance and intuition. Under a relaxed gaze, the white dots, which are also laid out on a diagonal grid, can evoke tight rhythmic constellations. Another almost mythic layer of presence emerges in the work. In Cat.#45, on the other hand every coloured dot is caught in roundel of black, set up on a roughly drafted pencil grid, an entrapment all the more dramatic because each is hand painted. These coloured centres vibrate against their bonds, with a collective energy as subtle as Brownian motion, the indicator of energy omnipresent throughout the universe.

Every work in Enigma #3 possesses a unique intense presence. This is an astonishing achievement given the temptation to become formulaic, to merely extend existing discoveries. The greatest delight of the show is to trace each one, to engage every dazzling detail.

David Bromfield

July 2002