(selected by Hannah Firth)
Co-rner, 1995 - 2006
Glasgow-based Merlin James' practice as a painter has evolved over two decades, exhibiting widely nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Brussels, New York and Chicago. He paints heterogeneously, across an eclectic and diverse range of painting genres - seascape, landscape, portrait, erotic, interior, still life - as well as with variations in style, 'ranging from dark impasto on mis-shapen, detritus-strewn canvases to smoother, Fauvish studies.'1 These quasi-abstract paintings are at once playful and melancholic, emotive and rigorous, physical and illusionistic, referencing elements of landscape, transitional structures such as sea walls, piers, bridges, doorways; images of figures (sometimes sexual) or anonymous buildings; transcriptions of older paintings and antique photographs. For James, it is misleading to group the works by an apparent common reference or theme and instead questions what it is that unifies the work as a body, given the lack of 'signature style' or consistent subject. In the words of critic David Cohen 'the paintings ooze criticality - each mark on the canvas seems deliberated upon as if an individual, reasoned argument might have to be made for it'.2
Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1986, 'James both anticipated and influenced certain cryptic, anti-heroic trends in current painting. However his work is set apart, not least by highly evolved formal and pictorial concerns, and a complex relationship to tradition and innovation. Neither a calculated, postmodern makeover of styles, nor a willfully naive post-Theory 'bedroom' painting, James' work engages the viewer with varying degrees of representation and comprehensibility; the borderlines of what we can recognise in (and what we can recognise as) one of his paintings, is continually tested. Artist's intention and viewer's interpretation are repeatedly put into question, in works which nonetheless hazard meaning, beauty and an account of human experience of the world.'3
James is interested in the materiality of paint, and his paintings asks questions about the limits of materiality. 'For me thinking is itself messy, dirty and strenuous, and in a way physical'.4 Their making is messy and chaotic, a physical act; they're consistently worked to a small scale and exclusively in acrylic: 'its less seductive than oil; you have to work harder for your painterly effects, so you're more conscious of them'.5 Acrylic is also more conducive to mixing materials into the paint - sawdust, plaster, hair - and to combining materials onto the surface. Canvases are often worked on simultaneously then left to gestate in the studio; old works are revisited and remade, re-stretched onto new stretchers, cut down, adapted to new proportions. Paintings evolve towards some kind of resolution, taking months or years to complete - 'it is finished when it is fully itself and when I no longer understand it'.6
Some canvases are subjected to a series of 'Frankensteinian grafts and surgeries: pierced, cut, joined back together and gunked up with the sort of debris most artists have lying around their studio'.7 Holes, and the act of making holes in art often invites an emotive or psychoanalytic reading, referencing the body, aggression, wounding and abuse; for James, their function is neither emotive nor symbolic, 'nor an invitation to theorise about breaking into the picture surface. They are not like Fontana's holes for instance - they're just another element of pictorial vocabulary'.8 The paintings' geneses are complex and ambiguous: 'the idea that one image comes from another, or even from some 'reality' that it depicts - that's not how it works. Certainly the paintings relate to things or allude to things, sometimes to other art, or to photos I've seen, or to real places, even real people. But each work has to become its own source'.9
On the issue of subjectivity James draws parallels between his process of painting and the scientific experiment where research could be corrupted if subjectivity came into play too directly; James does acknowledge that the paintings do have emotional content and are far from clinical or unpoetic: they have 'mood' and 'feeling' but this is between the work and the viewer and is not 'embodied' within the work: 'I relate to my paintings much as any other viewer does. I do not feel I have any special access to their meanings just because I made them. That's why I say they are finished when I no longer understand them. If you like, they're finished once they have become truly unfinished'.10
Sea Paintings
Sea Paintings, 2005-2006
Biography
Merlin James (b. 1960, Cardiff) studied at the Central School of Art, London (1979-82) and at the Royal College of Art, London (1983-86). James is also an art writer and previously held the position of Assistant Editor at the Burlington Magazine. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Sikkema, Jenkins and Co, New York, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Vitamin Arte Contemporanea, Turin. Group exhibitions include Things We Lost in the Fire, Transition Gallery, London, 2006; Seeing Things at Galleria Fabjbasaglia, Rimini and Direkte Malerei/Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim [2004/05]. In 2007 James will have a solo show at the New York Studio School and will represent Wales at the Venice Biennale 2007.
A solo exhibition at Galerie Les filles du Calvaire, Brussels, runs from 20 January to 20 March. He lives and works in Glasgow, and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Andrew Mummery Gallery, London and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
References/links
1 Nell McClister, Artforum, March 2006
2 David Cohen, Merlin James at Francis Graham Dixon, London, Art in America, February 1998
3 Andrew Mummery Gallery, London
4 Merlin James, edited transcript recorded from public discussions relating to Merlin James: Easel Painting, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and BayArt Gallery, Cardiff, 2005
5 Merlin James, unpublished interview with Licia Spagnesi, 2005
6 ibid
7 Christian Viveros-Faune, New York Press, Vol. 15, No. 26, 2002
8-10 Merlin James, interview with Licia Spagnesi, 2005
Galerie Les filles du Calvaire, Brussels
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Andrew Mummery Gallery, London
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Wales at the Venice Biennale of Art
Merlin James: Easel Painting (discussion, 2004)
January 2007
