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Thursday 4 December 2008

Curiosity unsatisfied

Mari Lassnig
Serpentine Gallery, until 8 June

Alison Watt: Phantom
National Gallery, until 29 June

The paintings look elegant and cool from a distance, but up close the surfaces are less attractive. Predominantly white, they are painted in a palette ranging through Payne’s grey to yellow ochre, cadmium red and burnt sienna. (In this they remind me of the short story by Anatole France of a monk dreaming of God. He’s been told that God is white, but in his dream he sees a great wheel of light and each section is a different colour. Only when the wheel turns fast do the colours blend into white light.) In the subdued lighting of an overcast day, on grey walls, Watt’s paintings looked cold and clinical, despite the folds and hollows and openings so suggestive of warm flesh. I find them very difficult to like. At first glance, these pictures seem to be about shadow and substance, but actually they’re about absence.

Down in Dorset, at The Study Gallery of Modern Art in Poole (until 15 May), is an intriguing collaborative project between a painter, a film-maker and a musician. The painter is Day Bowman, whose work I have been following with interest for 20 years, the film-maker Ian Knox, and the musician is the jazz drummer Steve Harris, whose recent tragic death makes this exhibition something of a memorial to him. I haven’t seen the show (which apparently involves an installation of maritime detritus collected locally), but I like the idea behind it — to explore the threshold between land and sea, those areas of what is often wasteland or semi-industrial decay. Called ‘The WaterZones Project’, it features Bowman’s paintings inspired by quays and oil drums, gasometers and reactors, and the fortress-like sea defences that prop up our coastline. The grittiness of the subject is transformed and interpreted by art, but, in the case of Bowman’s paintings, reality keeps breaking in, and her usual abstract idiom is for the first time invaded by figurative imagery. You glimpse in her work the rusting hulks of containers, the vacant lots you might see from a train window. The effect is not as depressing as it sounds, but strangely heartening.

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