Thomas Reinhardt starts each work without a preconceived scheme or idea, allowing the act of drawing, cutting, and assembling to guide him spontaneously towards new discoveries. The negatives of his cut-outs are never discarded but become the sinews of future works, opening up further explorations.

His abstract cut-outs dazzle the eye with their striking combinations: gaudy, glossy, clashing primary colours rub shoulders with the subtlest of exotic shades and textures. All the traditions of colour composition seem to be defied but somehow they come together in a kind of wild chorus. They flow over the surface in endlessly curling, fernlike forms that seem to be in constant motion. Yet these often come into collision with stiff, sharp-edged formal structures, just as the riot of colours is.often sobered by stern black bulks and outlines. Some of the larger pieces seem swept by a single tsunami of invention, curving and bucking in whorls and eddies over the whole expanse. Others lend their independent spaces to chess-like games of lopsided counterpoint.

Almost always there is a sense of vibrant surface life, a flatland of elbowing organic and geometrical forms where everything seems caught in a present instant.

An intense energy is released by the clash and conspiracy of colours, by the precarious and unpredictable equilibrium of the parts, by sudden rifts and gashes that threaten the evolving shapes. Most compositions are animated by an almost childlike exuberance, but others, especially the smaller formats, are quiet, meditative pieces of great simplicity, zen-like paradoxes of form and colour. But each work comes to evoke some overriding, unifying emotion—be it delight, celebration, puzzlement, horror, wonder, or just plain fun.

Bill Dodd

Bill Dodd was born in England and took his degree at Oxford. He taught English literature for over forty years in the universities of Bologna and Siena. He has published studies of romantic and twentieth-century poets (Keats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Edwin Muir) and of Shakespeare's plays and poetry.