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Old tricks masked in poses of the New Romantics

Black Marks is Alex Pollard’s first Scottish exhibition for two years – and it’s his most rewarding work.

Black Marks is Alex Pollard’s first major outing in Scotland since he represented the country at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Then, Pollard’s work focussed firmly on his own practice and on the making of art in general, with explicit references to art-historical movements. In Wall Drawing, he crafted hands from rulers that made marks on the gallery wall, occasionally erasing their mistakes. For Figures, he borrowed from Futurist collage and painting, sculpting fighting figures from perfect copies of Staedtler pencils. His Beasts were dinosaurs with more rulers for limbs, presented on parodies of museum display tables.

At first glance, Pollard’s new work, a Talbot Rice, looks to be an about face, with it’s references to clowns and clowning, the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, David Bowie’s early 1980s adoption of that costume, and the New Romantic movement’s integrated poses. As the exhibition reveals itself, though, it seems the Pollard, while he has looked beyond the studio for inspiration, is really up to old tricks.

Nightscape is an obvious reprise of Wall Drawing, but, while his earlier piece saw art making itself, Pollard now has the gallery putting it’s face on, ready for a night on the town. Eyebrow pencils are elongated, undulating across walls like eyebrows and culminating in mucky smudges. Black lipsticks are studded about the walls, as are convex make-up mirrors, which lend viewers who take a closer look a reflected touch of glamour. And, as a mask of make-up is wiped away after a night on the town or on the stage, so Nightscape will be painted over at the exhibition’s close.

Those mirrors also provide a preview in miniature of Clown Medallions, a set of metre-wide commemorative bronzes that feature the faces of clowns, some happy, some sad. The monumental heft of these sculptures is undetermined by their scrappy, unfinished surfaces – the clowns look to have been cast from hasty attempts to form faces from squishy globs of broken lipstick, their expressions impossible to read.

Next, a series of portraits entitled Romo’s Getting Ready sees shattered pencils stuck to grubby boards, ephemeral studies of temporary identities made from the tools of both Pollard’s trade and Romos’s.

The New Romantics are a good match for Pollard’s practice, which always mingles winking humour with rigorous examination. With hindsight, they may appear as daft as the bricklayers in drag of Glam Rock, but the movement’s underground beginnings were genuinely transgressive, inspired by politicised drag acts and reacting against the decidedly masculine aggression of late punk by putting on a show. The nightclubs namechecked in Neil Mulholland’s introduction to the exhibition – St Moritz, Le Kilt, Le Beetroot – are, too, a reminder that the first New Romantics were a distinctly self-aware, silly-serious bunch, eager to undermine their apparently po-faced theatrically. Bowie’s clowning on the cover of Ashes to Ashes is another perfect fir for Pollard’s looping game of reference and counter-reference: he borrowed his look from the New Romantic, who had borrowed their look from him.

In the upstairs gallery Pollard brings on the clowns again with a set of dim, monochrome paintings, a series of fades to grey. Clown is a Pierrot’s with a thick pencil for a head; Profile is a Medusa-like figure, its snaking hair made up of distorted, twisting pencils, its body the jumbled contents of a make-up bag. At this point, it becomes clear that Pollard’s new set of influences rest on an interest in transformation, with the transformation of a face with make-up allied to the transformation of materials into works of art. The metamorphosing, half-finished figures in Pollard’s paintings also point to his interest in the artifice. He doesn’t just use artists’ materials in his work, he crafts immaculate copies of artists’ materials, and his incessant questioning of the status of objects is an implicit challenge to the viewer still uncomfortable with Duchamp’s legacy. The clown is also an ambiguous figure, entertaining and inspiring fear in equal measure, thanks to the grinning or maudlin mask that makes it impossible to gauge true emotion. In looking to the clown, Pollard sheds light on his own insistence on making ambiguous work with his eyebrow permanently raised, hinting that the wit inherent in his sculptures, paintings and drawings is intended to reinforce, not undermine his investigations into his own practice.

Black Marks is a subtle and multi-layered body of work, then. It might lack the immediacy and instant gratification of Pollard’s previous work, but this is no bad thing. By stepping out of his studio and into the nightclubs of the 1980s, the circus and the theatre, he has made a body of work that is richer, more contemplative and, ultimately, more rewarding.