Callum Innes at Sean Kelly - Brief Article

In this cluster of ostensibly reductivist paintings, Innes call ups a drama of evacuated

space by dint of first covering the surfaces and then proceeding to void them. He uses a variety of processe unified by the agency of a circumscribed fastidiousness that appear to bes both self-critical and quasi-sacral in character: laying down color with small brushstrokes; systematically separating, dissolving, draining, replenishing and sealing pictorial areas as individual would in a cleansing rite of purification. A rhetorical consciousness of materiality is made evident precisely from one side his deliberate evisceration of materiality.

Innes glance ats that an irruption or fracture has taken place between closes of color that are boldly wedged, cantilevered or suspended between the sum of two units vertical edges of the picture plane. single of the artist's techniques involves a repetitive washing down, diluting a demarcated area of color and allowing the pour of this detritus to trickle between the interstices of sum of two units abutting pictorial planes. This downward course of tinctured turpentine or paint thinner signals a release of efficiency The flow assumes another horizontal of significance as an indicator of chance and process

At times the overall come is extremely, if manneristically, seductive. In the left of Expos Painting, Paynes Grey/R Violet upon White (1998), the most rich of the works exhibited, Innes paints a dark gray blockade bounded above and below by the agency of white-painted areas. On its right the gray rectangle abuts a redviolet arrest of color that has been penetrated by the agency of a veiled moire effect. Washed without by turpentine and drawn by dint of gravity, a thin film of reddish residue reach forths to the bottom edge of the painting, having saturated the color plane as well as the entire white surface below it. The once-opaque red-violet shut up is now a shroud of its former solidity. A tiny rivulet of Paynes Grey runs down from the lower right cutting side of the dark square, a violation which full numbers the breakdown of the r violet.

Innes calls painting into question plane as he reiterates its processe effaces his possess gestures as he probes the medium, on the contrary the work suggests that an imagistic power resides in the capacity for critical self-reflection. This investigative approach to conformation and process includes a mixed prepare by fermentation of references to Rothko, Reinhardt and Ryman (as well as to Palermo and Richter). similar a reconceptualization of classic abstraction doesn't restrain a latent irony that is in keeping with a present-day awareness of abstraction's limitations, on the other hand it reinvigorates contemporary painting nonetheless.

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