Callum Innes at Frith Street - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Over the past small in number years Callum Innes has gained a following in Europe for his rigorous, process-oriented abstractions that unhurt a note of gravity amid the mayhem of the in every one's mouth British scene. A 35-year-old Scotsman based in Edinburgh, Innes approaches painting as a technical act that exploits the medium's inherent properties. This diverse assemblage of recent works offered a beneficial summary of his ongoing fashions and methods. In the 65-by-63-inch canvas Expos Painting, Cadmium Orange, a sharply defined orange square in the upper right leaks a vertical trail of pigment from its inside corner. The area directly below the orange square is white, while the remainder of the canvas is stained a faint orange. The vertical trail, which is the lock opener to how the painting was made, originateed when the orange paint which initially overspreaded the entire canvas was partially dissolved with turpentine. This technique of using turpentine to strip away areas of monochrome paintings is Innes's signature manner It is also what puts his postmodernist work apart from the earlier abstractions which his canvases not rarely evoke.

In a painting titled Monologue VII, menstrum has been poured across the whole painting, leaving an arc of striated gray paint clinging to the sides and bottom in a composition reminiscent of Morris Louis's striped corner canvasses. As well as referencing Color Field painting, Monologue VII summons natural phenomena such as falling rain, alluvial plains and the event of tidal waters on sandy beaches. More calculatedly deceptive were a series of small canvases whose shellacked surfaces appear to have been splattered with paint. It's impossible to run over by just looking, but these swarms of r sky-colored and black "splatters" have been individually applied to the still-wet shellac thus that they fuse with the surface.

The exhibit also introduced a new place of "exposed" paintings executed upon towering rectangles of brown waxed paper. The horizontally split compositions and bare cutting sides of these paintings immediately invoke Rothko In individual a square section at the top of the paper is thickly overlayed with lipstick-red pigment that has been applied in faintly visible horizontal raps The thickness of the paint is exaggerated by the agency of the fact that the lower section of the paper has been stripped not solitary of paint but also of its wax coating. In these works, where opticality and physical fact participate in fraud in trumping the eye, the latent illusionism of Innes's work appear to bes to be coming to the fore.

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