Round and round and round in the circle game: Marek Tobolewski's Continuum In Symmetry

NVA editor reviews Marek Tobolewski's large-scale new show at the Djanogly Gallery

We’re captive on the carousel of time

We can’t return, we can only look behind

From where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game

Joni Mitchell, The Circle Game

As the seasons go round and round, Nottingham artist Marek Tobolewski’s work continues to entrance and mystify.  Continuum In Symmetry (Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside till 13 June) is the most impressive show of Tobelowski’s I have ever seen. His work seems to have expanded to fill the crisp open spaces of the Djanogly Gallery and the audacity and ambition of his 20-year project are at last given a stage on which to express themselves.

It is indeed 20 years since he started tracing circular lines on paper and canvas and his work has continued to explore that starkly simple but eternally fertile territory throughout those two decades.

Continuum has a double significance for Tobolewski: on the one hand, almost all his work comprises continuous lines drawn, painted or indented on a variety of surfaces; on the other, his artistic practice seems to be a never-ceasing journey along a single path, continually striving for new insights and perfections.

Rather than Joni Mitchell, it is to Mark Rothko that we are invited to look.  The catalogue of the show (written by Mark Rawlinson) begins with a quote from Rothko, which seems to stand as both guide and justification for Tobolewski’s patient re-working:

If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again – exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.

Rothko’s own later work dealt constantly and obsessively with pared-down structures, reaching deeper and more troubling conclusions as it progressed.  Tobolewski’s paintings are very different in style from Rothko’s, but something of the same obsession threads through them, prompting nagging questions in the spectator’s head.  Why does he keep doing this?  How does he have the patience and the resolve?  When will he ever feel that he can move on?  Should he move on?

For me, this exhibition goes beyond those questions which have troubled me in the past.  I begin to see the point, which is partly that there is no point... 

I have often struggled to rationalise those endless arching lines, to define just what they represent.  I begin to see that they do not represent anything pre-defined, but rather that they have the potential to represent almost anything that we - collectively and individually - want to see in them.  I strive to find spiritual inspiration in them and I find myself increasingly satisfied. 

Yesterday a child came out to wonder

Caught a dragonfly inside a jar

Fearful when the sky was full of thunder

And tearful at the falling of a star

Many of the finest pieces, notably the two large oil on linen paintings called Continuum In Balance (2006), suggest the inchoate chaos of the post-big bang universe before form began to take hold; others, like 2LC Sym09 Black (2009) and 2LC SymR+M (2010) (both oil on paper) resemble primitive DNA cells in x-ray magnification.  The building blocks of life appear in different shapes and manifestations, stirring up long-buried memories that remind me - with wonder - of the fragile structures of life.

Yet those visions are not necessarily what Tobolewski intends, they are simply what they conjure up in my mind.  Others will see different things or perhaps they will see nothing at all.  In some of the latest work, people have gleefully seized upon more obvious identities, especially a striking plethora of what may be phalluses.  But in the best pieces there remains much to admire for the very fact that they are apparently formless.

Does this mean that for all its cleverness and the endless variety of colours and materials, the work is a kind of blank canvas inviting the viewer to do all the work?  If so, does that suggest an intellectual arrogance or – alternatively – a vacuum at its heart?  I do not think so.

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty

Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty

Before the last revolving year is through

For me, this exhibition achieves a grandeur I had not previously expected to see in Tobolewski’s work.  The painstaking repetition of the circles had in the past suggested something smaller, more precise, more intricate but without the sense of presence that the grandest art necessarily creates.  In this big gallery the work comes into itself. It “demands that the public look at it”.

I think this could, certainly should, be a breakthrough moment for Tobolewski.  He and we are not getting off the carousel for a while yet.  But the ride seems just that little bit more exciting than it has ever seemed before.