Sorcha Dallas

Alex Pollard’s work based around the theme of the fool is lost in space at the cavernous Talbot Rice gallery, writes Ian Gale.

One of the finest moments of the 2005 Venice Biennale was when Tim Clifford, then director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, told me he thought Alex Pollard’s work was so good that he might even consider suggesting a purchase for the collection. It was almost unprecedented. The ultimate Baroque man expressing a liking for a contemporary artist who was not principally a painter. But on coming round from the shock I began to understand what had caught Tim’s eye. Pollard is no slavish YBA conceptualist, nor does he rely on contemporary technologies for his impact. He is at heart a maker of objects, each of them imbued with the essence of his considerable intellect.

For Venice he had constructed a relief structure under glass in which a stick man, made up from traditional carpenters’ rulers, was supported on a landscape of corrugated card. It was instantly engaging: at once redolent of Arte Povera and high art with a knowing wink at our cult of museum culture. And you could see that below that wit there lay a sound understanding of the surreal lessons of de Chirico and Dada and their own complex roots.

Part of the effect of these works lay in the way they were displayed, in a tiny room of a Renaissance palazzo where they took on the appearance of curated objects worthy of veneration. In theory, the same effect should apply to Pollard’s new show at the Talbot Rice, his most ambitious to date, situated as it is at the heart of the university’s neoclassical college. And had the work been displayed in the adjoining pillared and galleried 18th-century atrium then perhaps this might have been the case.

Unfortunately, the venue is just too big. In the huge white cave of the gallery’s main exhibition space, with only one large wall relief, a single sculpture, some six canvases and a handful of other pieces, Pollard’s work is more than a little lost. What should be an intense experience has been diluted to a far from fair indication of the potential of this tremendously talented young artist. That said, it is worth the trip.

The potential intensity of Pollard’s new work is inherent in his theme. The clown has been a staple subject in western art for hundreds of years; a prime vehicle through which to pose fundamental questions. As an illustration of the tragic reality behind a fa?ßade of happiness, the clown cannot be bettered, and the idiot-savant of Shakespeare’s fools has always teased from behind those expressionless eyes and chalk-white face.

According to the all-too-brief exhibition guide (the catalogue is still in production), Pollard’s principal point of reference is the 1980s New Romanticism espoused by David Bowie in his iconic ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video. But there’s more to this show than an invocation of self-obsessed post-punk dandies posing at a nightclub. As much is clear from the piece which dominates the main room. On a large plinth stand five huge cast-bronze coins, each of which bears the head of a clown. Rather than being a direct assault on the monarchy, they would seem to allude to the idea that the clown as a traditional sidekick of the ruler. More than an amusing diversion, the fool, with his bursts of cautionary homespun wisdom, had a very real function at the courts of Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment as a refreshing obverse to the infallibility of an absolute monarch.

The specific difference between the fool and the clown, however, is in the latter’s use of make-up, and two of the walls pay homage to this. Across them Pollard has created huge collages using extended eye-line pencils which snake between mirror bubbles of powder compacts avoiding exuberant smudges of lipstick and foundation. The effect, entitled ‘Nightscape’, is a crude, figurative narrative close in feeling to his Venetian work. Here though, uncontained, it does not have the same ironic identity. Better are Pollard’s monochrome oil paintings in which he uses the form of the make-up pencil and other clownish accoutrements to create disturbing skeletal portraits. It soon becomes evident that Pollard’s clown is an updating of Pierrot, the Italian commedia dell’arte fall-guy painted by Watteau. But with Pollard, the character’s essential pathos is overtaken by the flipside of the clown’s character. What we’re talking about here is the power of disguise. Think of Cindy Sherman’s menacing self-portraits as a clown and Goya’s use of the carnival mask to imbue his works with a sense of the sinister. The Spanish master in particular was supremely aware of the power of the mask – carved or painted – to conjure up our demons. The paltry half-page of interpretive material has at least invented a word to describe this: apocalypstik. For the clown is no figure of fun. He is a harbinger of evil either within himself or from some unseen external force. This menace is most evident in two of the paintings here and a series of inventive framed collages in which the artist again uses shards of make-up pencil and lipstick to create expressionistic portraits. Entitled ‘Romo’s Getting Ready’, they beg the loaded question ‘For what?’

As we might expect with Pollard, the works also function on other levels. Not least, in using eyeliner as his medium he fuses the real world of his studio practice with the artistic and the invented. Make-up is effectively there to disguise the user but it can also be used to create images. Either way it’s the stuff of artifice, and similarly transient and fragile. By using the tools of the clown’s subterfuge, the artist embeds himself in the subject, and there is a sense that Pollard, with characteristically wry wit, is also asking to be considered a clown. Perhaps after all he suggests, such is the role of all artists, who must necessarily rely upon their audience for their very existence.

No amount of such questioning, though, teasing of profound, can compensate for the show’s palpable lack of substance and I left feeling as if I had only touched the edge of Pollard’s idea. He is a hugely talented artist but this was simply not the right venue. A tighter show would have propelled the viewer directly into the claustrophobic, disturbing demi-monde of the clown and left you gasping for air. Clowns are not about making people laugh; they are walking metaphors for the human condition which afford us a glimpse of our own tragic essence. While I felt a certain sympathy for Pollard’s clowns – whether pathetic or malicious – sadly, what I did not feel was that I was grieving for humanity.