Alex Pollard
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Romos Getting Ready (4), 2007
Born: 1977, Brighton
Based: Glasgow
Represented by: Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Born in Brighton in 1977, Pollard graduated with a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee between 2000–2002. Group shows include: ‘Selective Memory’ (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh); ‘Counterfacture’ (Luhring Augustine, NY), ‘Size Matters’ (Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekshill, USA), and ‘Tender Scene’ (Changing Room, Stirling). Pollard was selected to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005. This has been followed by solo shows at The Reliance, London (Disintegrating Hand and Other Works), Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow (Torch Sculptures), Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (Black Marks) and most recently Whitechapel Project Space (Tea-Leaf Demeanour). 2009 projects include ‘The Dirty Hands’ (with Clare Stephenson, CCA, Glasgow), ‘The Fool’ (group show at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland) and a residency at the Perth School of Art, Australia. In 2010 Pollard had a two person show, ‘Four Fatrasies’, with Clare Stepehnson at The Pumphouse Gallery, London, curated the group show ‘Little Magazine’ at SWG3, Glasgow and will be in the Studio Voltaire Member’s Show (curated by Rebecca Warren and Jennifer Higgie). He also will have his second solo show at Sorcha Dallas later this year. Pollard is based in Glasgow, where he is a part-time lecturer in the Painting and Printmaking Department of Glasgow School of Art.
Pollard deploys the argot in its original sense of a ‘thieves code’ to frame the ‘appropriational’ traditions of post-modernist (and historical) painting, whilst compiling densely enigmatic visual symbols redolent of an underworld polari. His working-method is phoenix -like, reducing his chosen images to an ‘abstract language’ and then reforming them as dissolute fictions. In the past, his ‘argots’ have included Robin Hood, the tools and artefacts of studio practice and the fashion-world-alchemy of Ruby and Millie and Revlon. His analytical process of reproduction is undercut by a metaphorical form of sabotage, notably in a series of works in which he twists his source-material under a photo-copier as means of generating home-made vortices. The delicate conventions of miniaturist painting are then combined with processes of accident and spillage associated with free-form abstraction. The results are often quite marvellous. The leaky crystalline images have the appearance of – to quote Ovid in Metamorphoses – ‘bodies changing into other bodies’, of solid objects warping and melting.
Through this eerie distorting lens, captured stories change into other stories: Richard Dadd-inspired figures of 19th century youths become Dickensien pick-pockets and vagabonds; lipstick and eye-line canisters amass to form the heads of Dada-esque clowns leering and grimacing in the dark. This defiantly fantastic quality - what Pollard describes as a flight in the face of ‘utter blandness’ - leads to works that are as rich in their imaginative possibilities as they are pointed in their critiques of contemporary cultural ennui. But a highly detailed and ironic sense of structure allows the works to embody a Romanticism which is edgy and scabrous rather than flabby or sentimental. Their quixotic aspects are routinely anchored to subjects that are narcissistic, mercenary even illicit in their connotations.
