Sorcha Dallas

For painter Alan Michael the message matters, not the medium.

As he puts the finishing touches to his one-man show in the Talbot Rice Gallery, Alan Michael can afford to look a little pleased. Not only is it his biggest show in Scotland to date by a long way, the installation has gone swimmingly and the gallery looks great.

Visitors to the Talbot Rice might be forgiven for thinking that Michael is a new kid on the block. In fact, the 40-year-old artist has been making work in Scotland for a decade, steadily building his reputation both in London and internationally. Last year he had solo shows in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Although he was raised in Scotland and studied art first at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art in Dundee and then in Glasgow, Michael’s work has rarely been seen here, apart from a show with Sorcha Dallas in Glasgow in 2005. The show at the Talbot Rice, part of Edinburgh University, is his first major contemporary art space in Scotland. How then, to introduce himself to the home crowd?

‘Originally, it was going to be an overview of the work I made in the last few years,’ he says. ‘As it turns out, this is all new work, but it is a diagram of the way I make work.’ The show reads like a sampler of the various styles he works in, from photorealist painting through pop art-influenced text paintings to a series of new silkscreen collages.

The question of how artists work is central to his practice. He speaks about putting on different approaches and attitudes as if trying them on for size; when he made the silkscreens he was ‘stepping into the attitude, the spontaneity, of a collagist.’

‘When I make realist paintings, it’s very laborious. I got interested in making things that allude to a more flexible approach. The shifts are supposed to transmit an attitude of flexibility. There’s a lot of talk in art theory circles of how artists are mirroring the wider world of labour, that idea of flexible labour forces.’

In the event, he says, a little wryly, the silkscreens ‘took absolutely ages,’ but the spontaneity is still there. The images he used are ‘snaps that I took of furniture in a restaurant,’ the compositions, in bold primary colours, are a nod to work by Robert Rauschenberg: ’ I wouldn’t call them a homage, more like flicking through a book and choosing something.’

All the works in the show have a kind of pop art sensibility. The large photorealist painting of a tenement reflected in the shiny side of a car is modelled on the work of American painter Richard Estes. ‘He got lumped in with pop art in the 1960s but in fact he’s more or less totally reactionary, he just happened to be there at the time. I find that really interesting.’

This, Michael says, is one of the paintings he means when he uses the word ‘laborious.’ So is the still life upstairs showing a line of empty wine bottles, distorting and reflecting the lettering behind them. Both works challenge the limits of photorealism by their use of shiny surfaces.

‘Suprisingly, it’s not that hard,’ he says. ‘It’s not as hard as you think. The first time I did it, I though I might not be able to do it, but it just takes time.’

Although Michael has been described in the past as a photorealist painter, he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. Contemporary artists who paint are so rare, it’s assumed that those who do are making a statement, but Michael avoids this too: the basis of his work is rigorously conceptual. ‘Painting is my format but it’s not necessarily the medium itself that’s paramount.’

He draws references from high and low culture, but emphasises that he chooses his points of reference casually. His interest is more in the process than the material. Nevertheless, there are careful choices at work. The restaurant photographs speak of a middle-class fixation with modernism as fashion. BMW mini, the logo which forms the basis for his text works, was chosen for its blandness. ‘It is an object out of the present, rather than referencing the past. It’s totally middle-of-the-road, there’s nothing avant-garde or edgy about it.’

A 21st-century version of Andy Warhol’s chicken soup cans or boxes of Brillo pads? ‘Perhaps except that the Mini is middle-class, it’s on the way to being a luxury item, it’s not a car for everybody. I think Warhol was more looking at stuff you could buy for very little money in the supermarket.’

Michael, perhaps unlike Warhol, is not making a comment on mass culture of consumerism. His work is more about the use of cultural references than the references themselves. He’s aware that this makes it difficult, all the more so for appearing accessible.

‘Because I’m trying to convey attitudes of making types of work, it’s confusing if you don’t know the whole story. It’s not rocket science but you couldn’t really walk into it completely cold with no knowledge of what is behind it.’

‘I’m really happy with works that are like that. When I first got interested in contemporary art, I was looking at people like Martin Kipppenberger, a lot of German art. I found it incredibly confusing the first time I tried to engage with it. I didn’t understand there was irony at work. Once I discovered that, it was incredibly liberating, I think it’s a really positive thing. There’s nothing wrong with having to think.’

What other people are saying

‘If Michael’s work initially appears obtuse, it’s worth asking whether things that are truly worthwhile ever come with an explanatory note.’ Tom Morton, writing in Frieze 84.

‘Michael refuses to adopt a style and stick to it; all his work has a surface attractiveness, but if you give it time, you will to get a lot more out of it.’ Pat Fisher, curator, Talbot Rice Gallery