These shapes are not the product of whim; they are the result of common sense. Allington is no faux naif. Nor is he untrained. He simply thinks about things he cannot understand and evolves his own answers to them. At any given time his work embodies the latest stage of his deliberations. In his conversation one phrase crops up repeatedly to describe what he does: he says he is 'getting it wrong'. Then he corrects himself. 'Getting it wrong my way.'

Allington has always been preoccupied by the shifting status of the world. Trompe l'oeil exercises such as THE GOLDEN PAVILION: AS SEEN FROM THE FRONT (1984) proceed from moments of actual uncertainty. He relates a childhood experience of crawling up a gulley in Cumberland out of a valley covered with orange bracken, when, because of the shape of the hill and the angle of the sun, he moved and the bracken turned blue. Drawing and sculpture together offer the possibility of stage-managing such incidents, of simultaneously registering and eradicating discontinuity — in sculptural terms, of making the greatest possible disparity between angles of vision. Both in terms of vision and belief, the reaction is one of fluctuation. Describing a panorama he saw at the age of nine in Innsbruck, a combination of a 360 degree painted canvas depicting a battle scene from the Napoleonic wars and real earth and scattered objects, he says simply that 'as a child my eyes and mind ... alternately accepted this extension of the illusion and then rejected it.'2 But to extend an illusion is also to destroy it. If both visual situations are viable where does the truth lie? Perhaps it exists between the polarities and can be shown only by a cipher of absence. THE HALL OF THE MIRRORS' SCREAM (1985) employs the mirror and the window, the two main metaphors for representation in Western culture. There is no true way of picturing a mirror. Nor is there a way of perceiving reality in a mirror, which inverts any image before conveying it to the observer. Once more truth escapes. Just as ornamental fragments exist in the absence of the building on which they depend, the goal of Allington's work seems to have no physical existence; it is the grin without the Cheshire cat. Even in less deliberate operations, Allington remains aware of what Joyce called 'the ineluctable modality of the visible.' In his drawings objects cast shadows so odd — either perverting

the objects we assume have cast them or appearing out of perspective — that a dialectic is established between the 'real' and its double which calls both into question. Invariably the figure-ground dichotomy is emphasized; Allington's paper is never blank or new but consists of a collage of old, found documents with a history of their own, bearing information which demands to be read in a different way from the drawing.

If Allington brings his viewers to a boundary between defined modes of vision, he does something similar when coping with another aspect of the status of objects: their nature as genuine or spurious. This year he has been making bronzes of his wooden sculptures, calling them 'false' versions. Yet falsity seems inbuilt into his way of approaching things in general. In a characteristically dogged attempt to find a sculptural vocabulary that would be complete, personal and 'true' he spent a year making IDEAL STANDARD FORMS (1980), a set of floorbound plaster shapes. The apparent discrepancy between the adjectives 'ideal' and 'standard', the celestial and the workaday, is typical; these imagined forms would be divested of their ideal nature as soon as they were made. The very gesture of manufacture, then, of forcing imagination into real terms or adding one more dimension to the drawings, indicates the unsatisfactoriness of either dimension; the work, essentially, exists nowhere. In more down-to-earth terms, of course, Allington explains that in making his version of Platonic forms he was failing in his own way.