A wizard in the gallery

Merlin James’s influences are myriad, and he is almost painfully aware of art history in his work, but there is something seductive in his ‘deceptive modesty’

LOOKING AT THE work of Merlin James, it seems somehow appropriate that, while he was born in Cardiff, in 1960, he is now based in Glasgow. He studied at the Central School of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London. But it’s interesting that in the long run he chose to base himself in Scotland, even though London was the obvious destination for an ambitious artist of his generation – a generation that includes many of the celebrity YBAs.

It's a good indication that his artistic priorities might be a bit outside of the mainstream, as indeed they are. Visit In the Gallery, a survey show of his work at the Douglas Hyde, and the quirky singularity of his approach is quickly evident.

For one thing, unlike virtually all the YBAs, James works within a tradition of Western easel painting. He works within it while also recognising that he stands at a certain remove from it, but he is not a postmodernist in the knowing, ironic way that term has come to imply. It’s as if that, while acknowledging that our relationship to artistic style is not as innocent or authentic as it was once presumed to be, he still wants to find a way to make paintings that are authentic, that deal with his own experience and the world at large without the protective distance of irony.

At the same time, his work is suffused with self-awareness, and with an awareness of art history (he is also a respected writer on art), an awareness that is anything but easy or relaxed. His paintings suggest a relationship to history and artistic conventions that is very uneasy, even anxious. In fact, quite often one feels he can’t set out to make a painting without questioning every aspect of the process. Hence he’ll turn a stretcher back-to-front, or repeatedly pierce the canvas surface, or paint on a thin, transparent material rather than an opaque, primed canvas, so that we can see the whole physical structure of the support, or he will use an extreme representational shorthand that alludes obliquely to pictorial convention or example, rather than spelling it out.

Equally, he doesn’t entertain the notion of a signature personal style or genre. He works in modes that run the gamut from fairly conventional representation to extreme abstraction via faux-naïf mannerisms. He tries every genre, including landscape, portraiture, still life, interiors and interiors with figures, including a strand of erotic scenes (hence the cautionary notice displayed at the gallery entrance, although it’s difficult to imagine anyone finding anything to be offended by in what is a fairly dry show).

James’s sources are myriad. He’s worked directly from life, in terms of whole scenes and fragments, evidently from memory, quite often from paintings that engage him, by many artists, and from photographs.

If there is a consistency to his work that amounts to something like a Merlin James style, it is its determinedly low-tech, quite messy appearance, something often carried to extremes. A painting can have a physically wretched, abject quality, like a roughly finished piece of ad hoc DIY, say, in which dust and debris have become mixed up in sloppily applied glue. James does, as it happens, mix such unorthodox materials as dust, hairs, wood fragments and dirt into his acrylic pigment. And he will often mix and over-paint colours into a muddy, indeterminate hue.

As the labels indicate, he can work on pieces over a long time, cutting them down, adding to them, sticking bits together, making holes in them. His aim is to create something that possesses an eventual autonomy. He needn’t understand it – in fact, he said at one point that a work is finished when he can’t understand it any more, and he feels that he just can’t add anything else to it. He’s not definitive about this, though, remarking on another occasion that the important thing is that works “transcend intention in some way”, and admitting that he’s revisited paintings he had considered finished and substantially altered them. Finish is “not an absolute thing”.

Another point of consistency in his work is its distinctive mood. Many paintings positively exude melancholy, something that surely stems partly from their physically abject character. But then the melancholic spell is often broken by a mischievous, whimsical air, and by his periodic delight in a genuinely felicitous piece of fine painting – and it’s not unreasonable to wish he’d give in to this delight more often than he does.

There is a long list of artists he’s either on record as admiring or references directly in the titles and imagery of his own paintings. It includes Delacroix, Poussin and Morandi, as well as less well-known figures such as William Nicholson, Jean Hélion, Serge Charchoune and, perhaps surprisingly, the supremely cool stylist Alex Katz. James will quite happily take a detail from someone else’s work as a subject. He doesn’t copy it, although the resemblance can be overt, and he doesn’t translate it, so to speak. It just becomes the subject for a painting like any other subject.

"I am interested," he wrote in answer to a question as part of Lancaster University's Visual Intelligence Project, "in art of deceptive modesty." It's a term that could clearly be used to describe the work of several of the artists he cites as exemplars, but does it apply to his own work? In the Gallerysuggests that it might, up to a point. Sometimes a showy or even false modesty is in danger of winning out. What's convincing in the end is his willingness to take risks, to come across as recklessly non-ingratiating.

As they walked through an exhibition of his paintings in New York in 2007, James said to poet Ilka Scobie that he didn’t view the work “as done by a rational artist with a project. It’s more crazy than that.” And that is its strongest virtue.

In the Gallery

Survey show of the work of painter Merlin James (Gallery 2 features The Paradise[35]: Reverend Howard Finster's Message Posters) Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin Until March 28th