MERLIN JAMES .sx Satellite Airwaves .sx Jules Olitski was first acclaimed over a quarter of a century ago as a leading practitioner of so-called 'colour field' abstraction in America .sx Now in his sixties , he has been enjoying an intercontinental retrospective in America , France , Spain , and Britain .sx At the London show , the Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery featured the artist's recent disconcerting pictures , extremely thick surfaces of gel whose whipped troughs and peaks are oversprayed with clouds and bruises of colour .sx Gold , black , shocking pink and metallic green are powdered over purple passages of pigment , suspended in amber .sx They would look nothing reproduced in black and white .sx Certain concerns have clearly remained constant .sx Olitski's paintings in the past often contrasted weight with insubstantiality , density with diaphanous illusion , playing with the protean matter of paint - solid , liquid , gas .sx Spraying , dripping , staining , and cropping of the final segment of canvas to size - all these took emphasis of delineation or notation of any imagery .sx Again in the new pictures the outrageous textures are belied by a hightech sheen , as if inspection might reveal that they are huge photographs - illusionistic relief maps of a volcanic , planetary landscape .sx And once again emphasis on how the paint is put on diverts us from any thoughts of to what purpose ( expressive or depictive ) it is put .sx The paintings simply consist of the consistency of paint - the florid swirls and whiskings of the surface .sx And yet there would seem to have been a real change of sensibility .sx At first glance at least these pictures appear to court - indeed embrace - vulgarity .sx They rival the crassest department - store kitsch , as if painted by some smart young ironist sneering at cultured colour-field taste and abstract expressionist 'authenticity' .sx Where once Olitski gave us the lustrous refinement of incandescence on ancient Roman glassware or oriental pottery glaze , now he offers a heavy opulence suggestive of art nouveau , even Victorian ornament .sx The works have an atmosphere , almost a bouquet , that is heavy , over-rich .sx The curious flavour , the suggestion of 'expressive' brushwork being magnified ( hence sent up ) , and wilful slickness have inevitably brought the description 'postmodern' .sx Yet a talk by Olitski at the Courtauld Institute , pithy and amusing , revealed no fundamental change of philosophy .sx The aim of art is still to delight , affirm , elevate us to a heaven on earth , a near-mystical realm .sx It is Rembrandt , more than any other perhaps , whom Olitski looks to .sx The artist must animate , must bring the work alive , not as a Frankenstein's monster - a being with no 'moral centre' - but as an inspired creation .sx " Quality " and " Spirituality" , two " unfashionable words " , are those he stands by .sx Asked if he believed in the reality of spiritual phenomena , he replied that what concerned him was not the truth but the usefulness of such a notion , " if it works for me " .sx And as to the meanings of the works ?sx Nothing can be said , and thereof one must remain silent .sx ( But why Olitski asks , must critics always bring up Wittgenstein ?sx ) The artist must " get out of the way " in the creative process , and let the painting happen " through " him .sx When the painting takes control , then Olitski trusts it to be of value , even - or especially - when the results are surprising and perhaps unpalatable .sx Hence the new work , then .sx But Olitski did not broach the problem of how radically different are people's ideas of what kinds of art manifest that uplifting vitality and inspiration .sx The artist may trust the creative forces which he taps to make good art , but when Clement Greenberg asserts in the catalogue that Olitski is " the best painter alive " , with the proof that , well , " his art is there to bear me out " , this will not do .sx The " unfashionable " values of " quality and spirituality " are also those , for example , claimed by the late Peter Fuller for a totally different kind of art .sx ( It has yet to be assessed whether that critic's advocacy of certain artists and dismissal of others amounts to more than another unsupported assertion :sx " their art is there to bear me out " .sx ) Support for Olitski , anyway , needs to be carefully argued .sx If there is a " moral centre " to this , in some ways , intentionally empty work , surely part of the point would have to be that it is a ghost conjured in a machine of uncompromisingly artificial parts .sx The work's character would be one created against all odds , through the most literal melodrama and the most theatrical gestures .sx It needs to be argued that beyond the artex finish the pictures have sustaining complexity and individuality , a more than superficial richness and nuance .sx It is interesting to read that facing the death of a pet animal , Jules Olitski's impulse is to draw the creature .sx Ultimately the major debate may still be whether life on Earth is best enhanced by art works that do not represent its forms .sx One artist who will not be persuaded is Timothy Hyman , spokesman for the revival of narrative figuration in Britain in recent years , whose paintings and drawings were getting a major showing at Austin/Desmond through October .sx Hyman's paintings take us on a kind of hectic piggy-back through the artist's world .sx Countries , cities , streets and faces swoop by .sx Horizons tilt , walls and floors tip up , a goldfish-bowl universe surrounds us .sx We join a bus queue in Islington , get on buses , into houses , gain vantage points over sprawling townscapes .sx We seem to see through the artist's eyes , except that so often his profile edges into the periphery of the scene , reminding us that we are seeing over his shoulder .sx At times he steps more fully into view .sx He is captured , in the pin-hole camera , a kind of wayfaring Everyman , shown 'Coming Across Blake's Grave' , proposing marriage in Great Pultney Street , sitting at 'A Table in Covent Garden' , keeping vigil at a hospital bed .sx The vindication of the 'literary' in painting is part of Hyman's project , and certainly many writers come to mind ; Eliot's unreal city , Larkin's " where bridal London bows the other way " , and there are touches of Betjeman - his self-depreciation , his helpless crushes , his London backdrop .sx Among artists one senses that there are many with whom Hyman has affinities .sx Spencer may be one .sx Less encouragingly , for some , Anthony Green may be another .sx But the painter also finds precedent for his distortions , abbreviations and juxtapositions in the wider world of popular imagery , medieval art , carnival and folk culture and fairytale .sx Teeming with tell-tale incident , Hyman's images are often constructed of thin paint , scrubbed , wiped down or runny , and notation is often loose , with elements of caricature , except in more formal portraits , which are close to Kokoschka's portrait manner .sx Occasionally an interaction of colours sings out , a combination of shapes meshes , the touch smoulders , visual texture bristles .sx Not least in the largest , most fantastical picture in which the artist , striding across Primrose Hill , reaches up beyond the mundane shell of London skyline into a realm crazy-paved with mythological and psychological archetypes .sx It is as if the scale and intricacy of this painting demanded a degree of formal organization ( and hence perhaps a distancing between artist and subject matter ) absent in the other pictures .sx By and large , though , Timothy Hyman is deliberately anti-formalist , and such a different artist from Olitski that it is almost unseemly to mention them together .sx Olitski once defined the progress of modern art as one of " style warfare " - each new style defeating the last .sx Hyman's world picture may indeed envisage the obsolescence of abstraction .sx Olitski for his part has the odd rearguard skirmish with new postmodern challengers whom he charges with academicism - with not being a 'real' avant-garde .sx He thinks Schnabel possibly " our Meissonier " , while for Greenberg Keifer is a Carri e-grave re to Olitski's C e zanne ( a slightly unfortunate choice of parallels , because it is Olitski who , questions of stature apart , is close to Carri e-grave re in sensibility .sx ) .sx But clearly in recent years the style wars process has been modified .sx There are no longer any decisive defeats ; no style falls from favour entirely , and all kinds of art exist side by side .sx We have a kind of cable TV range of art .sx Flip from Olitski to Hyman .sx Flip channels again , you find , say , the Ian Davenport show at Waddington - big classy abstracts made with poured streaks , splatters , swathes of paint .sx Gloss on matt , black on black , browns with creams and beiges cross-woven .sx This was sophisticated interior decoration , superb fabric design .sx The exhibition's runaway success is primarily to do with the particular mood and temperature of the moment in the art world .sx A few years ago the pictures would have been run of the mill .sx Shifting attitudes and tastes , and ever more knowing perceptions and interpretations of painting styles have made this sort of literal yet latent abstraction look for a moment less familiar , more considerable .sx With these pictures we are almost back with Olitski's colleagues of the 'fifties and 'sixties .sx And ironically , far from ousting such styles , new figuration has contributed to their revival , simply by providing a foil against which their discipline can once again appear refreshing .sx Switch channels again , to find sub-new-German-expressionism still getting good viewer ratings .sx Margaret Hunter at Vanessa Devereux , digging deep into her subconscious with Baselitz's trowel ; Ian McKeever at Whitechapel , doing Keifer over again , but from Nature .sx There are any number of Artists in similar mode to these .sx Flick channels one more time .sx Harry Weinberger at Duncan Campbell , depicting his motifs - landscapes or exotic still-life objects ( carved animals and figurines ) in a patchwork of clear , pale colours .sx Watch this a while .sx The pictures are more than decorative :sx neither form nor colour is naturalistic , yet this is not expressionism .sx Another kind of artifice is at work .sx There is little overpainting , as if the pictures , with their zoning of flat areas of tone and colour , are drawn out in advance and 'painted in' in quite a calculated way .sx Weinberger's is a European rather than English sensibility .sx Born in Berlin in 1924 and moving to England in 1939 , in the past his work has been close to Martin Bloch or Josef Herman .sx The recent pictures have striking affinities with the French painter ( too little known here ) Charles Lapique .sx Weinberger's concerns - with subjecting a motif to a painterly treatment governed by formal logic - are in many ways the very stuff of modernism , concerns with which so many painters have grown bored .sx Now and again , as in the chalky or suddenly bright paint-box hues in the jigsaw clouds and hills of 'Ilfracombe Harbour' or 'Fishing Boat , Barmouth' , one senses the pictures launching out into the genuinely inexplicable .sx The challenge is clearly to take such concerns to a level of ambition beyond the familiar and the easily assimilable , not by adopting grander scale or more provocative subjects as is so common , but by following the clues thrown up by the formal means .sx An artist like harry Weinberger may have additional problems presenting his work to the world ( the art world anyway ) in a way that demands the level of sophisticated consideration given to , say , an Ian Davenport .sx On reflection , though , the current climate creates problems for any artist seeking to cut through the Babel-babble of styles .sx While the old 'style wars' pattern was oppressive , dogmatically excluding anything outside present trends , so too is the new free-for-all in which every kind of art is welcomed on to the endless satellite airwaves .sx JOHN SYNGE .sx Driftwood .sx Margaret Mellis/ Albert Houthuesen .sx Commenting on two of her relief constructions in Glasgow's 'Great British Art 1990' exhibition Margaret Mellis denies as irrelevant any distinction between the abstract and figurative content of her work .sx " Hovering above the two , " she claims , " allows double scope and freedom - construction and colour lock together .sx This is what I have been groping towards since the beginning .sx " Mellis has hovered between rather than above and has now landed , anyway in her own mind , on the figurative shore .sx She knows quite well that she cannot , as she suggests in the Glasgow catalogue , " both have her cake and eat it .sx " .sx The beginning for Mellis was in the late 30s when , married to Adrian Stokes , she settled with him in Carbis Bay just round a small headland from St Ives .sx