Dale Hickey's Easel Painting 2004 brings to mind Jan Vermeer's The Artist's Studio c1665/66 in the Künsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Both are about painting and the studio. In Vermeer's masterpiece, the artist sits in the studio before his model. In Hickey's, the studio is the model. A classic composure pervades both, and both explore the art and nature of painting. Hickey's painting is like a still life. It certainly is still. The hard-edged objects of the studio can be read in terms of realism and abstraction, the three-dimensional illusion of space, or flat, geometric shapes in tightly balanced arrangement. Hickey is wedded to the flatness of the picture plane, the paint on the canvas celebrating the beauty of its surface qualities. He orchestrates with the painter's tools of perspective and investigates ideas and styles, from minimalism, to conceptual art to postmodernism. The engaging compositional device of the high viewpoint also acts as a metaphor- this is holy ground not to be entered, a place of creation. Colours are essentially confined to primaries, exploring and celebrating the resonances of the blues and yellows. Like Vermeer, there are paintings within the painting as Hickey moves the from the actual, in which we see the depiction of the back of the canvas on the easel, several times repeated, and then reappearing as the window, of rectangles within rectangles. Creativity is a private affair between the artist and his canvas.

DAVID THOMAS