What's it all about?

If painting ever became a crime, and they rounded up all the usual suspects, they wouldn't get much out of Richard Gorman. Artists are always being coaxed and cajoled into saying what their work is about, something that can result in statements of embarrassing grandiosity (it's about "life", "the universe" and "everything") or self-contained musings in the jargonistic language of critical theory ("it challenges the meta-narrative of gendered post-colonial otherness"). Gorman is more wary. He has gone so far as to write a brief artist's statement to accompany a survey exhibition of his work currently showing at Itami in Japan. But those who turn to it hoping for illuminating insights on narrative references will be disappointed. He does admit that, as you apply paint to a surface, it effectively becomes a new surface. Apart from that, he describes the technical procedures that he follows: what sort of canvas he uses, the brand of oil paint, the medium, that sort of thing.

Born and brought up in Dublin, Gorman turned first towards business, studying at Trinity, before deciding to attend the Dun Laoghaire School of Art. For the last decade he has been based in Milan, though in the recent past he has taken to splitting his time between Italy and Ireland. Work is very much a way of life for him. He applies himself to it with exceptional dedication and concentration, something that comes across in the rigorous, closely argued quality of his paintings. Any terseness has less to do with personal reticence - he speaks enthusiastically and perceptively on art - than with the progressive elimination of inessentials from his work. The latter process is glaringly apparent in the paintings, made over the space of a decade, that form the Japanese exhibition. The exuberant, amorphous play of colour in Casa progresses through the jagged, churned up linearity of Publin to the few flat muted colour planes of the various "Untitled" paintings dating from this year.

As the titles suggest, the earlier work began with representations of something, perhaps an interior, or an object. Not that this was necessarily apparent in the finished product. "The finished painting consisted of the cancellations of these initial marks. But as the cancellations became linear they inevitably looked as if they might be something - they invited interpretation. Quite reasonably, people looked in there for images of animals or whatever." But that wasn't what it was about. He gradually came to think that if what counted was the eventual surface rather than the cancelled image, which was really just a point of departure, rather than a content in any conventional sense, then leaving the finished composition open to interpretation in this way was potentially misleading. "I should say that I was reading two people who encouraged me in this line of thought, Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, and Donald Judd's contention that a painting could be a thing in the world in its own right, and needn't be of something. The conventional division between form and content wasn't useful as a means of analysis."

He is not making an argument here for autonomous formalism, the notion that the painting is entirely about internal relationships. "Anything that exists has a resonance in the world. You can't avoid that and you can't entirely predict or control what that resonance will be. But the notion that a painting had to be loaded with meaning, as it were, that I had to put that meaning in . . . If content was all that mattered, then all the painted depositions would be equal." Which brings him to where he is now: making a new surface by cancelling a pre-existing one with layers of colour. Colour and compositional structure are the basic ingredients. "I used to suffer a certain anxiety about the colour getting too decorative, but I feel I've moved beyond that decorative issue now, and I'm more able to use it in a direct way."

His palette is muted and earthy: rich in greys, sombre greens and ochres, and quiet blues. This might make the pictures sound dull, but they are emphatically not. They take the light well and are very much alive. Areas are mapped out and coloured, then generally scraped off and recoloured, or directly painted over. The surface is calm but not worked to a hard-edged ideal of perfection. Some show-through, raggedness, texture and even splashes are permitted. A picture is pursued to the point of resolution but never beyond. Internal divisions are simple, straight or curved. Back to colour, though. Gorman has always been a very distinctive, understated colourist. There is a slightly retro air to his subdued palette. One wouldn't think of him as a particularly Irish artist, nor, despite his decade in Milan, as succumbing to Italian influences - though there is some evidence of oblique influence, for example in his preference for gesso as a medium, or his use of a shaped format in some paintings.

In this regard, though, it's interesting to see the response of Kikuo Ohkouchi, the Director of the Itami Museum, who writes very sympathetically and perceptively about his work in the catalogue: "Richard Gorman's paintings always remind me of the excitement I felt when I first visited Ireland and found myself standing in the landscape there in 1993." As he goes on to note, Kikuo wrote this knowing well the absence of any conscious intent to provide such references in the work. "It seems the more reticent his paintings become, the richer the images the give to the spectator." That's a gratifying conclusion for Gorman because it pretty much corresponds to his notion of a painting's innate resonance.

Richard Gorman, Paintings, runs at the Kerlin Gallery until January 11th, 1999. Richard Gorman's exhibition in Japan continues at the Itami City Museum of Art until December 23rd and next year will show at the Mitaka City Gallery of Art from April 24th to May 30th.