An edited version of this review was published as ‘London: Merlin James at Francis Graham Dixon’ Art in America (February 1998)
The
paintings of Merlin James ooze criticality - and that is not simply a response
conditioned by knowledge of the fact that, in tandem with his painting career,
this 36 year old is highly regarded in Britain as an art-writer. The two dozen small canvases on display at
the Kettle's Yard Gallery, Cambridge, last summer, were subtle, poetic,
sometimes charming, often odd-ball pictures of nondescript buildings in
landscapes, depopulated interiors, quirky architectural details. But they all had an 'attitude' - an inbuilt
anxiety about the very act of painting - that comes out in their strangely
pinched quality, their reticence.
Without resorting to deconstructive strategies, they were clearly
paintings 'about' painting.
It
is not difficult to see why Hélion was such a role model for James: a pioneer
of purist abstraction in the 1930s who claimed Poussin as a forebear, he
unexpectedly re-introduced the figure in an odd-ball humanist late style all
the while retaining the lessons of his former abstract practice. In both criticism and painting, Merlin James
aspires to this dangerous middle-ground between avantgarde and traditional. Appropriately for Cambridge, another mentor
is F.R.Leavis. In his polemical
pamphlet 'Engaging Images: "Practical Criticism" and Visual Art'
(Menard Press, 1992), James laments the absence of an equivalent to the
high-minded mid-century new literary criticism. By including examples of his own 'practical criticism' of
pictures in the National Gallery in this book he implied that it's never too
late.
James
offers an unfashionable plea for visuality, for what is unique about the
painterly experience. The last thing he
would want is for his own painting to illustrate critical theories - a crime
for which he has often enough indicted conceptual art. Actually, there is a tension in his work
between rigour and deliberation on the one hand, whimsicality and naivity on
the other. It seems he has taken to heart
Leavis's dictum that 'the creative artist has to learn to be
spontaneous'. He paints objects in the
real world but with sufficient perfunctoriness - virtually in shorthand - as to
avoid the traps of observational realism.
Subjects like an easel in the middle of an empty studio, a prosaic
sub-bauhaus suburban house, scaffolds and stairwells and revolving doorways are
at one and the same time sophisticated ciphers for an art about art, and actual
structures to be filled in or painted over.
Boundaries, in other words, within which to be fresh and
spontaneous.
For
all his emphasis on visuality, James can be disdainful of the intrinsic quality
of materials. He has a puritanical
disdain for oil paint's seductive lushness, using acrylics precisely because
they makes him work harder. The
effects, in other words, must be pictorial achievements, not just sensory
accidents. His work can veer from dark,
lugubrious obscurity (a tendency unduly emphasised in the Kettle's Yard
selection) to near-kitsch daintiness.
Old
familiar cubist techniques make their appearance as he plays his games with the
syntax of painting: an easel painstakingly crafted out of applied bits of found
metal collaged into the paint surface. Sometimes
he risks appearing utterly naff, of 'painting by numbers', of being
intentionally deadpan, in a sophisticated dialogue with art history. But he is never really tongue-in-cheek. Even hitting the tonal and textural extremes
of murkiness or quirkiness just turns out to be another way of eliciting that
enigmatic poignancy so resonant in his more even-keel compositions.