Callum Innes is a Scottish artist born in 1962 and shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995. Although at first glance he appears to fall into that already overcrowded category of abstract minimalism, on closer examination he is quite removed, even critical of the complacency apparent in both the tyranny of formal abstraction where intention, absolute control and artistic will dominates (despite any claims that might be made for the role of the unconsious) and geometrical minimalism, which often sacrifices three dimensionality in favour of exploring more lateral relationships between objects, shapes and colors. On entering the gallery one first encounters his early works on paper. These oils, dating from 1990 and 1996 are exceptional for the way in which they draw attention to what is behind the paint. Its uniform application makes for impressive surfaces and allows for a more random pattern development when, in Innes' signature technique, the paint is treated with thinning solution, as it is less lightly to follow the vagaries of the artist.
'Untitled from 1990', (see first image) predicting his later works is executed in a dark grey/black to achieve a stripped, shuttering effect reminiscent of a Francis Bacon background that draws attention away from the paint as much as towards it. Like Merleau-Ponty's ideas of the visible and the invisible, the work suggests that the canvas (or in this case the page) functions in a corporeal manner like flesh, as a chiasm between presence, absence and becoming. As such we see the work in a paradoxical manner as both complete and incomplete, moving away from the blank page, yet frozen in that move.
This relationship between presence and absence becomes more overt in the new works from 2006, perhaps even pointing to a certain figurative dimension. More precisely perhaps, it is the ghost of figuration as forms are revealed through the application of paint remover to the canvas. Monochromatic applications of greys and dark violets are stripped away to reveal the onion layers of the paint, a history or genealogy of the canvas itself. Out of this appears the ghosts of the artist's movements, reminiscent of sharp unforgiving landscapes or gaunt Giacometti style figures approaching in the dark distance.
Of all the works on show, I felt at the time that the geometrical paintings were the least successful. However, it is interesting that Innes also applies his stripping technique here too, though in a highly determined and significant manner. In 'Exposed Painting Cobalt Green' for example (see the last image above ), it is apparent that each monochromatic square is composed of layer of different colors, much in the same manner as Sean Scully's heavily layered stripes. But while Scully's work reveals the history and process of an artist in search of balance, in Innes' work it is these early layers which are allowed to bleed down over the bottom right of the canvas, exposing the apparent self-contained identity of the cobalt green above as a ruse. Uniform colors are thereby split into multiplicities. The names of the geometrical paintings are telling in this light (Cobalt Green, Cadmium Red etc) indicating as they do a history and life to color. They are not simple elements but are complex forms in their own right. In this Innes I feel is questioning the valorization of color and relationship that we see in so much minimalism, suggesting that these fundamental units of the spectrum are not to be taken for granted.
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