Sorcha Dallas

The February show at Transmission brought together the works of Los Angeles based artist JP Munro, and two of his Glasgow-based peers Alex Pollard and Tony Swain. Viewers searching for an overriding theme or ‘curatorial rationale’ were most likely frustrated. On the other hand, they might have been satisfied to observe an actual or implied use of collage throughout all the participants’ work. However the elegant spacing of these extremely intricate and complex paintings allowed them sufficient room to breathe and prevented any superficial echoes – of form or process – impinging on the very distinct preoccupations of the respective artists. Of the three, JP Munro is the most hysterical practitioner of cultural montage, drawing on abundant art-historical forms and references to produce a morbid juxtaposition of scholastically resonant styles and incongruous subject matter. Notably the oil painting on canvas entitled Initiation of the 33rd degree of the Scottish Lodge uses a technique reminiscent of Van Gogh to evoke a sombre gilded and carpeted nineteenth century interior setting, for a bizarre sorcerous or Masonic ritual going on amongst its elegantly clad male occupants. The mottled subterranean space in Minerals looks much like an underground version of Max Ernst’s lurid apocalyptic landscape of 1942 Europe After the Rain. Thankfully these convoluted enigmatic fictions are compelling enough in a dramatic sense to rise above any banal subversion of pedagogy or linearity implied by their heterogeneous pastiche of art historical tropes. With their predilection for images of entombment, decay and incipient fiery immolation, their tableau like visions link to cinematic and theatrical enactment of a Gotterdammerung or Pandora’s Box – from Wagner’s operas, to Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark to Robert Aldrich’s cold war film-noir Kiss Me Deadly.

Alex Pollard’s works are quite serene by comparison, despite occasional flashes of linguistic aggression. The titles often appear as verbal captions hovering inside the paintings themselves and are especially confrontational, recalling some of the more pugnacious admonitions of the Vorticists. Paradoxically Wyndham Lewis’ fascination for the vortex owed much to the scientific marvel of the still point at the centre of its whirling voracious trajectory. Pollard’s We’ll Throw Glass in Your Face,a monochrome canvas based on Richard Dadd’s Victorian folklore painting The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke evokes a similarly quiet – if disquieting – eye of the storm, an eerie vacuum or blind spot of fiction. The painting begins where Dadd’s vision ends using the periphery of the original composition as a sort of frame and opens up a shadowy void or chasm in its centre with vague suggestions here and there of vegetation and impish figures in the gloom. It is as though dusk had fallen over the supernatural rites of Dadd’s strutting sinister pixies. The results are abstractly beautiful – the dark greys built up with washes and glazes turn almost black in places; the lighter areas are tinged with glimpses of a red ground. The companion paintings, including Robin Hood Vortex in which the eponymous English hero is distorted and swirled into a lopsided three-headed apparition, are rendered in sharply defined patches of tone, breaking apart like the viscous reflections in a funhouse mirror.

Tony Swain’s oil paintings on collage newspaper supports manifest their complex structures in a rather a different way. Small in scale and fastened directly to the wall of the gallery, the works are quite sculptural in their affect of layering. Their slight and fragile forms are made to incorporate a varied array of interacting elements from the spliced broad-sheet images, to the tactile and luminous features of the paint itself, to the intrusion of other more deleterious marks made by tearing, taping and gluing. Consequently their purist virtues, whilst evident in qualities of subtle editing and delicate handling are never tedious. A consistent and beguiling colour scheme of turquoise, dark brown, crimson and sky blue (suggested by the appropriated media) gives rise to occasional vague figurative allusions – sky, architecture and statistical diagrams – but theses representational qualities are kept at the merest level of inference. Sometimes the paint seems to affect a direct transformation of a corporate none-aesthetic, but in Intents, Previous to Discovery the news-media remnants, honed to an elegant geometric composition, are entirely deprived of their mundane connotations. Elsewhere, the more abrasive elements prevail – a torn photograph of bubbles, fragments of graph paper, and a small bit of text showing through translucent washes of paint.