Harold Cohen, from the start of his career, was concerned with the expression and emotional potential of colour. In Constant, the irregularity of the shapes quickly draws the eye to focus on the contrast between primary colours and secondary colours. Other works from the same year explore this spatiality of effects created by diagonals, symmetries, asymmetries and a constant tension between repetition and variation.

In Alan Davie’s painting, there is a preoccupation with gesture, but also a shamanistic mood, “painting with an empty mind,” as he used to say, in a process of spontaneity, improvisation and rhythmic markings, such as in jazz. Davie played various instruments and, after World War II, he played the saxophone with a group of professional jazz musicians travelling Europe. The artist said: “There is a relationship between jazz and what I do with a paintbrush: improvisation and chance.”

His paintings are produced in a state somewhere between consciousness and semi-consciousness, approaching a primitive art: in their intuition, with spiritual intentions, and in the intensity of their dynamic quality. Smoke Signals no 1 captures ephemeral saffron yellow smoke: images of abstract forms of reality but suspended in an indeterminate space.  Cigarettes, microbial forms flitting across the canvas, with the suggestion of a mouth and teeth at the lower left-hand corner of the painting.