Layer cake
There’s
a touch of Mark Rothko about Scottish painter Callum Innes. The
artist is currently having his first solo show in Australia at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
Since the 1990s, Innes has emerged as one of the
most single-minded and successful painters of his generation.
His work is at the forefront of the international art world, hanging
in many prestigious public and private collections including the
San Francisco MOMA and Tate Britain in London.
Innes explores the possibilities of paint on canvas.
Seemingly simple to the eye, his works are a complex process of
addition and subtraction. His paintings are created through the
application and removal of paint – a systematic layering
and dissolving that has come to typify his practice.
He often paints a canvas in one colour before using
turpentine to wipe away sections of paint from the surface. In
short, he paints and ‘unpaints’ several times. The
end result encapsulates this action: the paintings always bear
traces of their chaotic production. Simultaneously, they are absorbingly
calm and authoritative.
Innes believes it is his manipulation of this painting
process that gives his work its complex beauty. He says: ‘I
know now how I want a painting to look, and how to achieve it:
it has to have a rhythm, a natural rightness when things start
to flow together. You have to edit – it’s not enough
to rely on the process, though I always know what the process
is doing.’ Often two thirds of his experiments on canvas
are destroyed.
In 2002 Innes was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize
and in 1995 he was short-listed for the Turner Prize. Despite
his international reputation, he has chosen to live and work in
Edinburgh, and his paintings draw on the clarity of the light
of Scotland.
The exhibition incorporates the Exposed Paintings
series, as well as the seminal Monologues and Identified Form
paintings. Working in series, Innes has developed a unique painterly
language.
The exhibition can also be considered an installation
- each work has been carefully placed in relation to the architecture
of the space. The earliest work 'From Memory' (1989) lends its
name to the show’s title.
