Untitled DocumentArt exhibitions may be large or small, or good or bad quality, yet each will always afford the visiting artist an opportunity to reflect upon their own practice. Last summer two exhibitions at the Festival d'Avignon got me thinking about how the artist's choice of materials (independent of how they are employed) contribute to the character of the finished work. The first exhibition was 'Terra Mare', a major show of work by the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló which spanned three sites in and around the Palais des Papes. I like Barceló. He is a prolific and playful artist who employs a lot of different materials: clay, pigment, oil, charcoal, canvas, bronze, and plaster, yet in each his Mediterranean signature is always discernible. I felt the most successful works were those where a certain tension was evident, for his art emerges from contrast: play and solemnity, the sculptural and painterly, Europe and Africa, the remembered and found. The second show was 'Les Ateliers du midi' by the Belgian artist Pierre Alenchinsky at the Musée Granet. Tachist, expressionist sensibilities pervade his work. For a time he was close to Dubuffet, and later a founder member of Cobra, but since 1951 he has lived and worked in France, and this exhibition featured nearly 170 of his works inspired by the vitality of the country's southern climes. A few early works were oil on canvas; but the majority of later work has been executed in acrylics, or ink, on paper.With Barceló, the sense was of the material's inherent generosity, offering up form and content in response to the artist's interventions. This was most evident when watching film of him working with large rectangular slabs of clay, hands dragging and gouging, till perhaps a fish or a face appears. It is a very energetic and physical approach that leads on to more quietly considered modifications such as glazing and firing. In a similar accretive manner his large canvases (I recall sea, vegetables, fish) seem to have resulted from layer upon layer of paint, charcoal, and varied encrustations. It was a very different story with Alechinksy. I felt his choice of medium was more about control and constraint: ink and acrylic dry quickly, assisted by the absorbency of paper. Studying his marks it was clear each image had been conceived and realised with minimal revision. The works, content aside, felt very different.

Two approaches, shaped by material choices, suggested themselves. The first involves selecting materials that demand a leap in the dark, a willingness to embrace surprises and numerous revisions; the second those materials which require a marshalled sensibility, a one-time coordination of body and mind. Examples of other modern artists gravitating to the first (more Dionysian) mode are Bacon, Pollock, Giacometti, Auerbach and Kiefer; to the later (more Apollonian) tendency works by Klee, Miró, Tapiés, Pasmore and Hume spring to mind.

I don't wish to suggest that one or other artist or approach is better than another, or to draw false boundaries. These are observations about disposition, not dogma. After all most artists will experiment and change their methods throughout their career. My point is that much emphasis is often placed upon an artist's particular style with regard to their modus operandi, yet what these two shows in Avignon underlined to me was that the artist's choice of materials, temperament and vision are deeply intertwined, and that this triumvirate are no less critical to the final image than the nature of their physical deployment. As a result I am now much more mindful that even before the artist enters the studio an acute sensibility is silently at play.