Press

Alan Michael doesn’t have much interest in what he puts into his art and doesn’t bother with research. Little wonder it looks so cold.

Alan Michael didn’t agree with his tutors at Glasgow School of Art.’We were encouraged to explore our interests and make work about them’, he explains. ‘I often see art based on the endless research into something like a chronic disease and I just think, like, duh! I don’t think research validates anything.’

Maybe this is why Michael has produced such a variety of work: his paintings and collages feature anything from writhing crowds of naked bodies to oddly melancholic portraits featuring lines of text. He also produces versions of other artist’s paintings – or the occasional plant. And some pieces feature collaged elements of Michael’s other paintings.’I’m interested in the idea of things colliding,’ says the 34 year-old Glaswegian.’I install the paintings close to each other, but there’s no particular link between them.’

In some respects, Michael is to painting what Wolfgang Tillmans is to photography. Turner Prize winner Tillmans famously confused critics by exhibiting images of Kate Moss next to shots of fruit and vegetables. But whereas Tillman’s work shows a sense of wonder at the world, any wonder in Michael’s work seems to have been displaced by something more sinister. His working method-cutting and pasting memories of other work – results in meanings, fragile enough to begin with, becoming yet more fragile.

One of his pieces depicts a pensive bloke in a North Face jacket and the message ‘Good Friday People’.It’s the title of a Christian book by a Chilean nun who lived under the Pinochet regime. So I photographed someone who looked like a politically committed Christian and created the painting from that. But the phrase ‘Good Friday People’ crops up again in another work, half-hidden among naked bodies cropped at different angles. It’s a typical Michael manoeuvre.

Or take the pieces which use other artist’s work. The naked bodies that fill one untitled, orgiastic group painting owe much to British artist: Lucian Freud’s famous portraiture style.Yet, heaped together, they become something monstrous, rather than the homage that such referencing normally suggests: ‘I guess it’s got an obsessed-fan quality, but I’m not a huge fan of his work.’ Similarly, while Philip Pearlstein is referenced in his work, Michael’s opinion of the sixties American portrait artist is: ‘I’m not particularly interested, but I don’t think he’s rubbish or anything.’

Maybe it’s this unusual honesty about his sources that makes Michael’s paintings so jarring. There’s care in there – each work is meticulously executed – but no sign of loving care. ‘Someone once said to me, ‘why would you put something you’re interested in into your work?’ and I kind of agree with that,’ he observes. So Alan Michael’s work is about the stuff that fills your head. Not good stuff or bad stuff – just stuff.