Black Image: The Pistol Shot

In his introduction to Victor Pasmore (op. cit., p. 16) Alan Bowness comments, 'Pasmore's interest in the irrational is not new; in the work of the 1970s, a period of great productivity both in painting and graphics, there has been a deliberate attempt to link up abstract art with surrealism, partly by the introduction of symbolic content. The form becomes an image and the image a symbol. Pasmore's art now relates to Miró, to Tanguy, to early Dali, breaking away from the rather narrow abstract constructivist tradition that exerted so strong an attraction in the 1950s. The change is not a fundamental one; it is rather an extending and a deepening of Pasmore's art that we see, so that, for example, ideas of symmetry are explored for symbolic as well as formal reasons. Pasmore observes that religious art is symmetrical, whereas naturalistic art is asymmetrical, and he is interested in the psychological implications of such a difference without being able to explain it. So the symbolic images are interesting in themselves, as visual phenomena, not as representing anything except perhaps psychological states of mind'.

In the introduction to the 1977 exhibition catalogue the artist comments, 'The fact that the object can now be removed means not only that painting can achieve an independence equivalent to that of music, but also that its imagery can be open to multiple implications in symbolic terms - a necessary condition in the ambiguous context of modern thought. Once the visual object is removed the painter must create his own morphology by adopting an intrinsic process of development. Independent painting, therefore, has emerged not only as a new manifestation of the art, but also the most radical development of the dialectical revolution in the philosophy of naturalist/humanist art'.