RONALD SIMS

A famous professor of architecture at the Glasgow School of Art once said, "Only architects can appreciate the humour in architecture". In Ron Sims' paintings the sense of humour is, on one level at least, no less esoteric, but surely on other levels we can all enjoy the delicious sense of humour going on here? How does George Stubbs, 16th.C. Dutch Interiors, life-drawing at the Royal Academy Schools, Walt Disney, butterflies, hippos and cowboys all come together and make sense? These paintings are both abstract and representational at the same time; and this gives the clue to Sims' eclectic and sometimes abstruse, hard-edge style.
Visual ambiguity allows a complicated game of association to take place.

The forms develop their meaning as the eye moves across the picture plan, in and out of representation and in and out of an architectural space, that creates a formal visual pleasure and a catalogue of innuendo and art historical in-jokes. This is fanciful visionary painting; Modernist in allegiance, Constructivist and Cubist in inspiration. He embraces these traditions for their importance in the development of the visual creative process. It is not suprising that Sims admires the work of Georges Vantongerloo, a Belgian Cubist sculptor prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Frank Gehry, the architect of the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art in Bilbao at the beginning of the twenty first.

Earlier, in Ron Sims' art school training, chats and meetings in studios with 60's Pop-Art icons Peter Blake, Eduardo Paollozzi, and Allen Jones, helped to fashion ideals and strategies in his paintings. In America, the hard-edge artists, like Stella, Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly were coming to the fore. The presence of East Anglian artists like John Nash, Edward Bawden, and Humphrey Spender, also contributed and shaped the beginning of Sims' very tonal, hard-edge style.

The architectural space (albeit as a pictorial illusion) that he creates, is enhanced by his choice of acrylic paint; it allows for the continual overpainting and fine adjustments of line, shape, edge, and tonal colour.
The acrylic polychrome forms, which sometimes protrude forward of the picture plane, manipulate soft imagery into rigid block representations. These forms suggest that his architectural fantasies are, in contrast, constructed from the familiar building materials of steel, stone, or painted aluminium.

In Ron Sims' work, contraditions of surface and form, ambiguities of pictorial space, visual puns, literal associations, and historical cross referencing, allow "Mickey Mouse with Hands in Pockets" to sit quite naturally alongside "Multi-Storey Bird Auto Park". There is a sophisticated visual language on show here, not just for painters and connoisseurs, but for architects too!

Barry Atherton
Charles Rennie Mackintosh Building
Glasgow School of Art

RONALD SIMS