Extract from Essay by Chris Townsend

Perhaps the most interesting of Caffell’s works in this situation are the recent ‘photographs’ as much as the later paintings. Whilst still wholly representational – his subjects are the wrappers and envelopes for photographic film and other materials – the use of a chromatic printing technique (platinum-palladium) and the particular emphasis that this places on tonal relationships between fields in the image renders the subject almost abstract. What we see in these pictures is not a figure but a series of related fields, all rendered in different tones of the grey scale, delineated by shadow and lines. The object disintegrates into ‘abstract’ planes, akin to those slightly reflective, almost metallic areas that Caffell establishes in the later paintings by careful use of diluted paint. (It almost goes without saying that as a painter trained in the early 1960s, and with four decades of experience, Caffell has a technical control of his medium that most young painters today would struggle to imagine, let alone match.) Whereas those shadows and lines would, in Reinhardt’s version of abstraction, take the form of a return to symbolic figuration, here they lose all specific reference to the world. That which in its medium is most literal (and the self-referential use of photographic materials as subject emphasises this), which most depends on the world as phenomenon to establish itself, and then mythologises the human ordering of that world, here breaks down almost to the component elements of making that figuration as its subject.