The Gate of Chalk

In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins…'
(Rumi)

The metaphysics of painting are central to Pierre Imhof's work: "Pixel Shmixel" develops his recurrent themes of territory, boundaries and texture to produce a surprising and compelling new topography. The abstract visual language has become denser, more resolved, while the tension between flatness and illusionist depth has been worked up into an articulate and affecting fluency.

I wanted to take something very geometrical and repeatable and distort it organically.

Each painting in this series has a cybernetic yet liminal quality, as if they represented the skeletal frameworks for virtual bodies, the lines becoming vascular, the curves suggesting the outline of a figure as the web agitates in its becoming an organism. Imhof takes the digital form and injects full-bodied life into it. These paintings hum. Playful and sensual, they tread a delicate line between planned adventure and wayward recklessness, making the mechanistic lyrical.

In all the painting in this "Pixel Shmixel" show, the artist has rationed and even obliterated colour. Alongside the tension between foreground and background, there is always the hovering question of colour's presence - or absence. Speaking more particularly of the Click and Pour paintings, Imhof says: "I am not interested in the seductiveness of colours as such, and after Click and Pour, poly I wanted to do a painting that was seductive without colour."

Both Click and Pour, mono and Click and Pour, white master the spectator through spatiality. Exquisite in their subtle shading and tonal harmony, they seem deeper and more mature, as though the shedding of colour and strengthened the power and beauty of the formal language. The eye roams freely along the vertical grid, gets caught and dragged away horizontally, and then goes onto trace the loops, like a child's crayon free-wheeling ver a more rigidly patterned ground. It's this moment of anarchy that endows the work with such wilful energy and spirit. Here there are structural similarities with Terry Winters, but the work runs shy of his tendency towards chaos.

I started in music first. I used to play the piano. I like the time factor. The ear has to take time to listen to music and these works are made in such a way that they can't be read immediately. It's not physically possible to focus on the whole canvas, so there's delay as you decide where to go within it.

Bish Bash Bosh, phase 3 forms a bridge between the Click and Pour paintings and the Pixel Shmixel series roper. There is a sense of balance and resolution, a loosening of tensions that will also characterise the later work, bringing a spatial delicacy that echoes Twombly. The omnipresent grid is now recessed and partially erased. Here it recalls the French squared notebooks Imhof used as a child when he first learnt to write, while the painting has the wonderful fluency of primal marking-making, without the pressure of legibility and form. Yet it has both. The black lines have a fragility and distinctiveness that recall Giacometti's elongations, tremoring into meaning, while the pallor and repetitiveness of the grid also recall the striking architectural drawings of Toba Khedoori, which share a similar intricacy and calm obsessiveness.

The infinity of these spaces comfort me
Simple textures falling open like a sweater.
(Adrienne Rich)

The Pixel Shmixel canvases and Habibi works on paper are thematically rigorous, disciplined and coherent. Each work stands as an autobiography of fracture. Moving away from the earlier information-technological frameworks - or absorbing them more fully into the work - Imhof has created complex, resonant emotional landscaped, less geometrical in character, more sentient.

Perspectives are as multiple as the patient, intent layering. Some lines act as fences, keeping the spectator out; others appear as stitches, sustaining the whole, holding it together, the divided terrain suggesting the linguistic borders of Imhof's native Switzerland.

I was thinking of the Palestinian keffiyeh. "Habibi" means darling or beloved in Arabic. I was appalled by the anti-Arab racism after September 11th and wondered about what I could do as an artist. The keffiyeh is a symbol of militancy, yet I also wanted these paintings to be peaceful. It's not a representation, though, more of a structural device.

Each painting or work on paper acknowledges yet subverts regularity and enforcement, while the play of light and dark is a key motif. Imhof first of all covers the canvas or paper with a layer of black primer, then draws a grid in coloured crayon. He then applies a layer of white acrylic. On this he adds a grid in graphite or charcoal, shifting above the earlier grid. Each of the five to six layers of paint has to dry to achieve the 'fluffiness of the white'. Imhof says: "Acrylic has the tendency to snuff out the canvas and I didn't want that. I wanted to retain the cloth feeling and build up the layers slowly, like beaten egg white."

Imhof is wary of losing meaning in repetition, and each canvas has its own particular nuanced musicality. Here is the language of Malevich, of Ryman, now infused with the compact, secret, interstitial life of culture and emotion, nature and nurture, the intimacy of the mark-making recalling the work of Nancy Spero. The irregularity of the square has a cack-handed poignancy: the paintings are resolved, as Imhof explains "through paint rather than draughtsmanship" and this makes them remarkably moving.

The paintings seem to evoke two elements of mothering. Here is the fabric of the tablecloth, the maternal gauze or muslin, the domestic. There is a sense that the milky whiteness will placate and pacify the harsh and bleak underlying black. Form upon formlessness. An awkward self-loving structure upon nothingness. A tender blueprint hidden and then exposed. Mostly, the distressed layers of white do not completely cover the darkness and this tentativeness is touching. "Will the comfort be withdrawn?", I ask. Imhof laughs.

There must be a color for the mother's
otherness must be some gate of chalk some slit or stain
through which the daughter sees outside that otherness
Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags
still smelling of umbrage
that can be crushed into a color…
(Adrienne Rich)

At first glance the images may seem cool and composed, yet there is a current of quiet conflict in them. Here is a troubled ground soothed and smoothed over by white, suggesting layers of plaster applied to surface whose cracks are cherished. Ambivalence hovers in the white spaces: the layers shift, there is no fixed ground. Yet the movement seems to revolve around many points of stillness. These points of tranquillity in fields of white, and the sense of encoded language, recall the works of Mark Tobey, influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

Imhof says there's a French word which describes him: pudique, which has its little-used English counterpart in 'pudic'. Evoking both shame and chastity, it signifies a reluctance to show too much. There is a simple transcendency in these later paintings: free of irony and pastiche, the artist shows himself willing to represent the crush of colour, the gate of chalk, the stain.