Merlin James at Francis Graham Dixon - London, England - Review of Exhibitions

The paintings of Merlin James slime criticality -- and that observation is not simply a replication conditioned by my knowing that, in tandem with his painting career, this 36-year-old is highly regarded in Britain as an art writer. Each mark upon his canvases seems deliberated on as if an individual, reasoned argument might have to be made for it. This substantial present to view of a cross-section of his work, his first at Francis Graham Dixon, was shortly afterward followed through an exhibition at Kingston University, where James was newly critic-in-residence.

James paints tricky poetic, sometimes charming, often odd-ball pictures of nondescript buildings in landscapes, depopulated interiors and random architectural fragments. He works chiefly in acrylic and usually at rather small scale. He is supremely self-conscious of the parameters and conventions of the picture surface, teasing the cutting sides with painterly details, sometimes painting around the sides of his unframed canvases, applying bits of place materials or punching holes into the surface of the painting. His handling is delicate and undemonstrative to a stage just short of deadpan -- and at the same time the works are somehow pervaded through a sense of anxiety about the real act of painting. There is a strangely pinched quality, a reticence, in his handwriting. His paintings can change direction from dark, lugubrious obscurity to near-kitsch daintiness, on the other hand they never strike me as being tongue-in-cheek as of that kind Current artists he slightly bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos are Luc Tuymans and Guillermo Kuitca, although in James the psychological drama is flat more sublimated than in these sum of two units in fact nearly absent.

He paints particulars from the real world with sufficient perfunctoriness -- virtually in shorthand, as markers of themselves -- to avoid the traps of observational realism, on the other hand without tipping the other way, to Bad Painting or the appropriation of a ground language of signs. Subjects of the like kind as an easel in the middle of an without contents studio, a prosaic sub-Bauhaus suburban abode or scaffolds, stairwells and revolving doors are, upon the one hand, sophisticated digests for an art about art and, upon the other, actual structures within which the painter allows himself a step of spontaneous expression. Techniques of pioneer modernism make their appearance in games with the conventions of painting: the image of an easel, for instance, is painstakingly crafted on the outside of applied bits of base metal collaged into the paint surface in a work which has now pierceed the Saatchi Collection (Easel Painting, 1992-93) In life, the easel supports the painting; in this painting, the painted surface supports the easel, which defies pictorial convention by dint of being "real" -- although who is to say that applied bits of metal are more real than manipulated pigment?

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