Sorcha Dallas

The photograph on the poster for Alex Pollard’s first big solo exhibition since representing Scotland in the 2005 Venice Biennale suggests you’re in for a rather coy celebration of the European clown.

It’s a black-and-white image of Pierrot applying his face paint, and it conjures up a tradition that has lost it’s meaning. This is a world of clowning not even as recent as Billy Smart’s Circus, harking back to the days of the commedia dell’arte, the impoverished theatre form that flourished in the 16th century, only for it then to be subsumed into other popular art forms. Today, Pierrot’s main guise is in sentimental porcelain figures, sold to tourists with more money than taste.

Fortunately, Pollard, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, is not concerned with such schmaltz. The clue to his exhibition is in the stroke of make-up Pierrot has applied to his cheek. It is in such simple markings that transformations take place: a smudge here, a wavy line there, and an ordinary citizen changes into something extraordinary. To claim the right to be lords of misrule, clowns simply alter their appearance with a few deft strokes of face paint.

Artists are involved with similar transformations, taking a white wall or a blank canvas and adding the simplest line or brush stroke to shift our perceptions. Pollard does that in a big way the moment you step into the Talbot Rice. On two walls of the gallery he has applied what appear to be lines of paint, undulating horizontally and echoing the black marks that decorate Pierrot’s face. There are shorter vertical lines, too, as well as a number of reflective circles, a set of eyelashes and several black smudges.

On closer inspection, however, you see that the lines are not paint at all, but three-dimensional black pencils extended to a surreal length. As in Pollard’s previous work, the raw materials of the studio – pencils, brushes and rulers – find a place in the work itself. In the context of Pierrot, the technique takes on extra resonance.

It’s hard to know how much clowning around Pollard has been induling in himself – like the professional fool, there is much method in his madness – but, in a playful yet serious way, he makes the connection between the transformations of the studio and those of Pierrot. He shows us not only the finished product, but also the tools of creation, the mistakes and the rough pencil marks. It’s as if we’re seeing him make something out of nothing.

This elemental piece is the most successful in the show. Also strong is Romo’s Getting Ready, a set of five square canvases that make a distant nod to the video imagery of Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie, himself a master of transformation. With the sparest of means, Pollard suggests the faces of clowns in the process of creating themselves. A wash of pale blue implies a conical hat, bits of broken pencil make hair, the top of a pencil forms both the eye and the make-up.

Close up, the images have no meaning; from a distance, they have a delicate sense of movement, as they seem to take shape magically before your eyes.

Also exhibited downstairs are five, out-size clown medallions, 3ft-high bronze coins, bearing crudely fashioned clown heads. They look like currency from a fantasy era when the jester was king. Upstairs, meanwhile, the black-and-white Pierrot theme continues with a set of gloomy oil paintings in which landscapes and clownish figures emerge from the distorted shapes of pencils, lipsticks and make-up pens.

Once more, we see both finished article and means of production, although they have less intimacy than Pollard’s best work and, if he really has anything to say about the new romantic movement of the 1980s, it is even more ‘opaque’ than the programme of notes claim.