Recently, it has become fashionable to talk as if all painting is representation (Julian Bell, What is Painting, Representation and Modern Art. London, Thames & Hudson,1999). It is not necessary, however, that a painting represents another object. lnstead it is more propable that paintings are evidence of the way in which artists move; traces of the artists having been present, of the marks they left behind them, and of the tools they have used.

It is often the result, on the other hand, that the marks cleated by the artist's movements are reminbcent of the marks created by organic forms growing in the natural world. Thus the traces left behind by Penker remind us of the bark of trees or the striations in a stretch of grass blown in one direction by the wind, or alternatively a flattened field of corn.

Sometimes these traces and marks are reduced in size, covering a small area the size of a torn scrap of paper; sometimes they are enlarged on a grand scale covering a wall of breathtaking dimensions or sometimes filling every inch of a large room. Then the size of the brush used comes to our attention and its continuous sweeps demonstrating the limits of the artist's movements. The margins where the movements of the brush themselves take on a patterning take us back to considering where the artist's brushstrokes began and where they ended.

Why is it important for us, then, to know where the artist has been, how he has moved, what evidence he has left behind him? These tracks show evidence of the artist's personality, able to see a macrocosm in a microcosm, a microcosm in a macrocosm. They are an indication of his ability to respond to the world as if he were looking into a mirror, seeking evidence of his own existence in the sweeping movements of his own brush, in ist rhythmic movement and the path it has left behind. Each movement demonstrates the artist's path in the world, over vast stretches of land and water. In the mirror he sees the surface of the sea or the sand in the desert, the grain in the bricks in walls or the weave of a cloth, but all of these are transformed into organic forms by the movements of his hand holding the brush. Therefore, it is important to distinguish the results from minimalism. They are not based on the observation of the structure of the world, observations which often lead critics to confuse minimalism with conceptual art as if minimalist artists were thinking about the way in which we conceptualise the world, reducing it to a series of uprights and horizontals. Penker instead is using the traces left by his own movements as evidence of the way in which forms in the world develop, by an accretion of small units. However, this accretion of small units does produce structures, not those based on observation of the world and how we form concepts about it, but structures comprised of random lines, lines that appear to swim in rivers like organic firms and fenced by the paths they have washed on surfaces or falling from those surfaces in cascades of colour.

It is the purity of these forms which impresses itself on our imagination. So clear and direct is their presence we are drawn to concentrate them in a mesmeric state. It is as if we cannot take our attention away from them and are impelled to reflect on the strength that Penker has given to them by reducing them to their intrinsic nature.

It is this purity of form which distinguishes Penker's works from that of other artists and makes him unique. He is able to leave the work almost untouched as if it has created itself. He does not see any need to intervene in the process more than is absolutely necessary. It is his ability to reduce the form to its bare essentials and to isolate it which gives it a kind of radiant power, brought about by its unimpedet simplicity.

It is as if the artist is continually searching for forms which are understated, but which impress us by the way in which they contain within themselves a concentrated distillation of experience gained from their travels.They are not only the marks he has left behind him in his own travels, but those marks have been stripped of all unnecessary baggage and impress us with their condensation of experience of creating surfaces.They are the culmination of a long journey of mark-making, of a search for traces which build on the purity of form created by a long history of a previous search for the purification of form.

What we must admire is the persistence with which the artist has pursued this path of searching for the form which resonates with the implicit strength of a single-minded stripping-away of all irrelevant considerations. In doing so, he has arrived at an expression of organic growth which is uniquely his own.

This is the path that Penker has left behind in his long search for the purest forms, but by doing so he has also reminded us of the forms that we ourselves can discover in nature, the patterns in shells, the ripples of sand on the sea-shore, the accretion of rocks which have rolled down hills, the alignment of leaves blowing in the wind, or the branching of growth in trees. These are not representations, but the structures we ourselves discover in the tracks that the artist has left behind him. By his constant and persistent repetition of his own unique forms he has provided us with an immense variety of imaginative experience.