Entering the breezy cool room of the RA leads you into a burst of colours and glimpses of Californian landscape. It is like taking a drive on a warm day, breathing the cool air, driving fast yet catching a glimpse of the tones in the land. Diebenkorn who is mostly known for his abstraction works, highlights his diverse nature by being a mixture of a landscape painter, sometimes a portraitist and also an expressive figure drawer within this show. His works on paper are works in their own right, they are an overflow of hues of greens, lands, and sun, a lot of sun. The atmosphere in the room is like walking through the scenes within his paintings, like driving in the green lands with the windows down, the scenery is a balance of colour and texture.
The show offers a solution to complex compositional and spatial problems. Diebenkorn certainly brings an enriching freshness to the RA this spring. He responds to the qualities of light, landscape, through a delicious mix of layers, to collapses of geometry and line, and incomplete erasures into a balance in the quality and between those elements. The paintings have almost a playful childlike demure, there are stretches, half shapes, sharpness and blurs, bold and weak tones. It is a visual language created at a whole new level using an abstract style like no other.
This is a show like never before, to miss it is to not experience the Californian sun and hues that have arrived at the RA this spring.
The exhibition runs until 7th June at The Sackler Wing, Burlington House.
£11.50 (without donation £10). Concessions available. Friends of the RA and under 16s go free.
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/richard-diebenkorn
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