The questions posed in Guston’s new paintings emerge from a long life of painting and from the different questions he has asked at different epochs in his painting life.

When, for instance, he first began to study the ‘structural’ painters such as Uccello and Piero della Francesea, he worked in their aloof mode willingly, putting distance between his emotion and his execution, seeking an equilibrium of clear volumes in space.

After a time he came to question the Renaissance world in which everything was assigned its eternal place. He then began to think about ‘the total picture plane.’ His compositions - allegories of urban life for the most part - became intricate plays of forms in strangely imagined spaces. Certain painterly ambiguities already began to take possession, undermining the static Renaissance harmonies.

As Guston’s thought turned to the symbol, or at least to the abbreviated form which bespeaks a wider radius of meaning, his vocabulary changed. More and more the atmosphere within which the figure moved (his early paintings were always about the human situation) became his subject. Finally, he was constrained to ask himself whether his subject was in fact a readable allegory. In answer, he swept aside the conventional human figure and all recognisable aspects of his environment.

At this point, moving beyond external nature, Guston began to paint the pale, calligraphic abstractions which were then compared with Mondrian’s plus-and-minus paintings and with late Monet. Although neither of these comparisons is accurate (the measured rhythms of Mondrian were never Guston’s, and Monet’s late paintings were still attached to their physical motifs) they indicate a specific question posed by all of these artists: Is not a painting about the known but not visible forces of nature, as well as about other things?

By eliminating classical perspective, then linear composition, then colour as local agent, and finally, even the cues to external phenomena, Guston arrived at the new questions which characterise his metaphysics of painting.

To begin with, the dim, palpable atmosphere of his new paintings is no place known to the eye. But it is known to the imagination. Hints of sea-washed air, of distant silvered lights, of buoyancy, of inhalation and exhalation, stir the imagination. From sense experiences, layered in the mind, the imagination construes its own universe, a universe that is illusion.

Illusion: a word almost lost to us through obfuscation. Illudere, L. to play against: It is the play against the immediate quality of ‘real’ experience which is the artist’s strength. To form a many-dimensioned experience on a limited, two-dimensional surface is the pride of the painter. By the initial paradox he plays himself against the commonplace and establishes his domain - the domain of the imagination, or the metaphysical domain. Not necessarily in the tragic mode of Nietzsche who spoke exaltedly of illusion and claimed that art was metaphysical solace. No, more in the mode of the modern philosopher Gaston Bachelard who in insisting on the reality, the entity of the imagination, held that the function of the unreal was just as vital in the human psyche as the function of the real.

Within the damp, throbbing environment the forms take on various functions. At times, they come near to being merely accents, slightly varied rhythms within the whole. At times they are like creatures, burrowing into safe recesses or pressing aggressively forward. Mythical overtones are in the nesting suggestions, and the birth struggles. A form can ride like a forlorn raft on the high seas, or it can struggle violently in the claustrophobic twilight.