John Martin – attempts at huge, Biblical scale become a distraction from the architectural fantasies being destroyed in passing. One of his most peaceful paintings is of the city of Babylon being destroyed by the Persians. But they have only just arrived. What really absorbs is the invented architectures, stretching as far as the eye can see. The invaders arriving on their boats have a job on their hands.
His maps of planned sewage and circular underground railways show a desire to wreak the same transformation on his physical landscape. A different sense of scale, and of genuinely apocalyptic change, arises from seeing Wood Lane and Porto Bello farms on the maps, linked to urban territory by lanes across fields.
Round the corner, one of Paul Noble’s pencil drawings matches these paintings both in size and carefully constructed fantasy. The people in John Martin’s paintings are either there to show jaw-dropping scale, or to be flung around by cataclysmic forces, or to be lonely witnesses as the Last Man Alive. For Paul Noble they are completely absent, represented only by ladders to be climbed, or mechanisms to be operated.
Lynn Chadwick’s Dragonfly and neighbouring stabiles have no references to people. Together with Nuam Gabo’s plastic sculptures in the next room it’s possible to see how geometrical and biological constructions can be an end in themselves.