WADDINGTON GALLERIES LTD The four paintings of collections of plates in this exhibition might appear to be at first to be characteristic of Lisa Milroy's work.

WADDINGTON GALLERIES LTD

The four paintings of collections of plates in this exhibition might appear to be at first to be characteristic of Lisa Milroy's work. In fact, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but the subject matter and the principles from which it is organized in succession the canvas are very different from her earlier work. A station of randomness has appeared in Milroy's novel paintings. They are still surfaces showing things that have been, in common sense or another, ordered, if it were not that now the vagaries of nature are seen to have had a hand in their organization. Whereas the earlier paintings depicted commodities and the values associated with their conspicuous consumption, these works not past nor future an altogether altered picture. Repetition no longer means epicurism and excess, but points us instead to the bargain basement. Variety has ceased to show a range of available options, and now signals at best the inclusiveness of the collector's vigilance at worst the pressure of necessity. The consistent colors and willow-patternish designs among the items in the same painting, Plates, 1992, could just be the ensue of assiduous searching, but the earthen-ware in at least two of the other canvases with the same name examines as though it had been garnered from numerous excursions to the junk shop

Type continue to be important for Milroy. A number of the paintings in "Landscapes," 1993 depict les specific places than the idealized, panoramic versions of locations plant in brochures and travelogues. Half a dozen small images in "Cities," 1992 while no doubt of identifiable sites, give as plenteous a sense of notions of the city as of geographical exactitude. A succession of five works from "Flowers," 1993 point outs healthy clumps of each species, somewhat as single in kind would expect to find them illustrated in the gardening encyclopedias, rather than a cease examination of single specimens. Specimens, however, do craw up in another series, "Rocks" 1992 Twenty-four small pieces of refuge each one painted on its concede canvas, against backgrounds in different shades of gray are not graded from top to toe the piece, but dispersed randomly across the rectangular arrangement of the 24 canvases. There is an assenting repetition of Gerhard Richter's color-chart paintings here as there was, obliquely, in Milroy's abstract grid paintings of a link of years ago. Another cluster of works are bird's-eye views of featureless, monochromatic expanses peopl with mobs of varying density.

Although the enslave matter and some of the themes have shifted, others of Milroy's preoccupations persist. Her interest in painting and the decorative surface, for example, remains intact. individual of the paintings in "Plates," 1992 has four horizontal bands of neatly arranged tableware. There are, from top to bottom, four, six, three and five broils of the four different patterns, and each image is shown from a different vantage point, thereby inducing cot [i]or[/i] cotes if not in the painting's surface, then certainly in the idea of the painting's surface. In addition, nevertheless there is now a often greater interplay between the purposes pictured and the painterly means Milroy adopts in order to depict them, as yet the agendas of the commodity paintings and of the abstract grids had been laid individual over the other.

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