Willie Landels: Recent Paintings

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Over a century, abstract painting split into two camps — gestural abstraction, which is emotional, and geometric, which is rigorous. Willie Landels' art turns this division on its head. For fifty of those hundred years, Landels has made abstract works that are both geometrically precise and full of emotion. At first glance, his latest series looks as though it might have come from the Bauhaus or Russian Suprematism; the young El Lissitzky springs to mind. But these new pictures are also characterful, even touching. Their clean forms and simple interplay of colour — a black line crossing a green, three-sided figure; a red square on an angled support — have personalitiesw, narratives; an unplaceable dry wit. They are the end product of endless experimentation, repeated gridding-up. And yet they have an ease and simplicity that makes them fresh, and entirely new. CHARLES DARWENT, art critic, Independent on Sunday