Sorcha Dallas

Alan Michael’s painterly style, like his artistic intentions, is hard to pin down. His paintings are often labelled ‘photo-realist’; certainly, the technical precision and geometric rigour of many of his most recent and meticulously worked canvases of man-made spaces might, at first glance, convince us of such categorisation. Working laboriously from photographs, he has painted images of urban street scenes and still-lives reflected in mirror-like surfaces. Yet formal exploration and the honing of technical prowess are of little interest to the artist. As he explains: ‘painting is my format but it’s not necessarily the medium itself that’s paramount’ (1). Painting, then, seems to be a means to an end for Michael and photo-realism simply one of the many styles he appropriates, with apparent indifference, for his purpose.

Michael is interested in the idea of things colliding. He adopts a rigorously conceptual stance, working a puzzling and eclectic array of imagery into his canvases with references drawn from both ‘high’ and popular culture. His recent exhibition at Talbot Rice gallery, Edinburgh, for example, juxtaposed Pop art-inspired text paintings with a colourful series of screen-prints of a restaurant interior and a group of lustrous hyper-real paintings of bottles and parked cars. The show was comprised entirely of new works and acted like a cross-section of the artist’s practice: a check-list of visually compelling formats. By side-stepping a more predictable retrospective-style presentation, the exhibition avoided any self-branding on the part of the artist. Although the works displayed a uniformity of surface allure, a diverse network of references was at play, most of which the artist claimed to have little or no interest in. ‘Stepping into the attitude, the spontaneity, of a collagist’, Michael cited sources as diverse as Pop art figures Robert Rauchenberg and Jasper Johns, the film makers Jean Luc Goddard and Jean Eustache, high-street record labels and current day commercial brands such as the BMW Mini (2). Such shifts of enquiry and idiosyncratic quotation highlight the importance for the artist of attitude over subject matter and particularly his interest in ‘the privilege of looseness and flexibility’ that can be adopted in making certain types of work.

The free and unabashed use of cultural references or iconic images by other creative industries, such as fashion, cinema, advertising and design, has held particular interest for Michael over several years. Adopting a similarly blasé attitude to appropriation as a model for making work, he groups, repeats or reflects text, items of clothing, plants, furniture, cars and figures from art historical and media sources in his suites of compositions. Early works featured an eclectic ensemble of bodies recycled from works by diverse twentieth-century figurative artists including Balthus, Modigliani, Lucien Freud, Barbara Hepworth, and Phillip Pearlstein. Between 2003 and 2005, his paintings of shoes explored the idea of the repeat motif; near-obsessive representations of the classic English brogue, duplicated within individual compositions and across a series of canvases, pushed subject matter to the extreme by abstracting it through systematic repetition. More recent canvases appear more anonymous, framing inanimate objects, empty vistas and logo-style text with the superficial gloss of marketing spreads and ‘the syntax of Sunday supplements’.

Michael’s Art Now exhibition, Mood: Casual, refines such ideas further and reads like a ‘mood-board’ of disparate visual stimuli. The artist throws together references with all the nonchalance of flicking through the pages of a book or magazine. He has commented: ‘Someone once said to me “Why would you put something you’re interested in into your work?” and I kind of agree with that’ (3). Here his source materials, sampled from the real world, are like common commodities chosen specifically for their blandness. But despite his avoidance of documentation, the artist’s selection of material exploits a subtle short-hand of personal codes that act as traces of cultural and social signifiers (4). For Michael, the Mini car, used as both image and text in Cars and Houses 2008 and White and Blue 2008, for example, is a readymade style object for the mid-market; a re-made version of a classic, with ‘nothing avant-garde or edgy about it’ (5). The same conceptual mechanism is used by the artist in his recent group of works on paper to reconfigure versions of a 1980s greetings card derived from the archive of a fashion designer. Michael’s apparently systematic experiments with different compositions and modes of painting extract the charm of the original hand-drawn design, which becomes more impersonally sleek with each of his changes.

Michael’s use of banal quotation from the middle ground, although carefully and knowingly chosen, is not meant as a critique of mass consumerism or the superficial research methods that he has observed in media-fuelled design industries. Similarly he claims little interest in involving himself in a discourse about painting and its current trends or identifying himself as part of an established network of artists. His seemingly casual grabs at disparate sources are consciously made and with a genuine interest in experimenting with a different model for working, whereby painting is simply his vehicle.

Paintings such as Untitled (Grassroots/Bottles) 2007 or Untitled (Glassware I) 2006 seduce the viewer with highly reflective surfaces and recognisable imagery. Yet, as Katharine Stout has observed, ‘the subject of the work is not necessarily what is being depicted, but the structure of the aesthetic exchange between audience and artist’ (6). The apparently accessible style of presentation adopted by Michael deliberately wrong-foots us; technical and superficial detail blurs meaning, literally obscuring words or lines of text, to deny any conventional narrative thread or easy exchange of information. Michael’s references to his own past works further complicates understanding yet serves to highlight that his practice is one of self-renewal and, not surprisingly, is fuelled by his own conceptual preoccupations. Despite his use of a seemingly impenetrable visual language made up of quotation and codes, his sophisticated re-workings of a range of cultural material are persistently beguiling. As he has commented: ‘Taken as a whole I think my work looks like a systematic project remembered in a dream and I can’t control that and I don’t want to’.

1. Alan Michael quoted in ‘Brushes with Reality’, Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman, 26th January 2008
2. All quotations taken from the artist (March 2008) unless otherwise stated
3. Tom Morton on Alan Michael, frieze, issue 84, Summer 2004
4. Laurence Figgis…
5. Alan Michael quoted in ‘Brushes with Reality’, Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman, 26th January 2008
6. Katharine Stout, ‘Alan Michael’ in Tate Triennial New British Art, Exh. Cat., Tate Britain 2006