MODERNISM was many things, but one way in which it changed the face of art for ever was to establish that what happens in a picture may reflect the world outside it, but need not depend in any way on how it appears to be organised: a picture is an im
aginary place where there are no set rules. It was the Surrealists in the next generation of artists who recognised that, seen this way, painting has a close affinity with the world of dreams. Things from our everyday experience can recombine and reorder themselves at will; the ordinary and the fantastic can coexist and dark things come out into the light. Steven Campbell, more than any other Scottish artist, realised the imaginative freedom this offered and then followed fearlessly wherever his liberated imagination took him.
Campbell died a year ago, in August 2007. He was aged just 54. When he was taken ill he was working on a large group of paintings for an exhibition planned for Glasgow School of Art in 2008. To mark the anniversary of his death the School of Art, in cooperation with Glasgow Print Studio, has honoured that commitment with the exhibition Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven … The title is Campbell's own choice and is a quotation from the libretto for Monteverdi's Orfeo. As one of the first modern operas and a tragic story of love, of the transcendent power of art, but also of the inevitability of loss, it is a poignantly suitable choice. Indeed it seems almost prophetic.
The two venues share between them a dozen large paintings. In addition, at the Print Studio there is a group of his prints and a self-portrait that Campbell painted for an exhibition at the RSA a couple of years ago. His own image is clear enough, but beside it a cruciform area of the picture is separated from the rest by yellow police incident tape. It bears the chilling legend, "Police – Death in Progress".
At the School of Art, as an introduction and scene-setter to the main show there is a painting from Campbell's 1981 performance, Poised Murder. This is a life-size portrait in black and white of Isabelle Huppert in the role of the murderess Violette Nozière in Chabrol's dark film of the same name. There are also a number of drawings here that are grouped thematically. The Apprenticeship series of eight drawings, for instance, reflects on his own apprenticeship as a steelworker – "apprentice shit" he labels it on one drawing – that he undertook before he changed career and went to Glasgow School of Art. The drawings are interesting in themselves, but they are also a reminder of how his paintings tended to evolve, not so much thematically in any formal way, but around a train of thought. As this one does, his exhibitions always had a carefully chosen title, implying that the exhibition was itself an art work and more than just the sum of its parts. His individual picture titles were always riddles, reflecting the riddling way in which his paintings are composed. Here a number of the pictures were left without titles, however, and so have had to be identified as part of several series ongoing at the time of his death.
Campbell was a painter first and foremost, but after his debut with Poised Murder, he always kept his interest in performance. There was an element of performance even in the way he dressed, presenting himself as a dandy and as an actor in the drama of his own art. Film was also a constant source of inspiration to him, especially the film noir that drew on the new liberty taken by the Surrealists to explore the darker side of life, as in the films of Hitchcock or Chabrol. Combining such a variety of inspirations, he took an exuberant delight in the fertility of his own pictorial imagination. Things happen chaotically in his pictures. They are never linear, never follow a simple, nor even identifiable narrative, even though the whole surface is alive with animated interaction. The opportunities painting offered him for invention were far too numerous and too diverse for his imagery to be pinned down.
Rugs, carpets and hanging textiles of one kind or another are a frequent pictorial motif in these paintings. When things get swept under the carpet, the intention is to put them out of sight and out of mind, but of course they do not go away, and in Campbell's painting they frequently come back to haunt whoever did the sweeping. Thus these painted textiles become a metaphor for the process of painting itself, where the flat, organised surface cannot always contain the surging life beneath. So this imagery also becomes a metaphor for the imperfect layering of the conscious and unconscious explored with such effect by the Surrealists. Here, in The Childhood Bedroom of Captain Hook with Collapsible Bed, the young Hook, who might equally be Peter Pan growing up, is suspended in mid-air. He has a bloody knife in his hand. His figure is half-incorporated into a hanging rug and he is also looking down apprehensively at the carpet under his feet. Its pattern is reassuringly domestic, a swirly Axminster, a typical mix of interlocking abstract and organic forms, but it is undergoing a sinister metamorphosis. The crocodile, that in Peter Pan was to become the captain's doppelgänger and nemesis, emerges ominously from within the swirling pattern. Behind and with a different take on fabric and flat images that are not as they appear, the artist, made up as Mephistopheles, is peering in through a net curtain.
In an untitled picture from the Fantômas series, almost the whole surface of the painting has been usurped by these surging carpet patterns. One figure in the picture is already overwhelmed by them. Alongside, the artist appears in triplicate, and although this burgeoning pattern has already overtaken a leg and an arm, it also seems to grow from his brush and palette as, of course, in truth it does.
In an untitled picture from the Baby Face Killer series, one of the tweedy hikers from Campbell's early paintings is emerging from the pattern of a hanging rug, a ghostly presence haunting the two main figures, both baby-faced. In another painting from the same series, the baby-faced figure emerges from a patterned rug hanging in the background, but the rash of pattern has absorbed a central figure, turning him into a Green Man, an ancient personification of the force of nature. It is as though somehow the natural forms on which the pattern is based are reasserting themselves in a visible struggle between nature and abstraction.
In Self-portrait as Lytton Strachey being both Thor and Madame Butterfly that struggle is explicit. Thor is a self-image. Like the artist, the Norse god was red-haired and red-bearded. Lytton Strachey may seem an unlikely hero, but his book, Eminent Victorians, helped his generation demolish the monolithic grandeur of the Victorian age and see the clay feet of its heroes. In the picture Campbell's own struggle with the past is made visible. The carpet patterns have evolved into a wild cubist composition, the burden of the art of the past, and the artist is struggling with its abstract forms like Laocoon struggling with the snakes. In contrast to this complexity, beneath and behind him are women harvesters painted in the simple style of pre-Revolutionary Russian art, a seductive, but equally false alternative. To the left, birds, always familiar spirits in his painting, are nesting in the awkward Cubist angles of a kneeling figure. The reference to Madame Butterfly in the title is suggested by the way the abstract shapes that envelop the artist make clumsy wings. More than any operatic heroine, however, these turn him into an Icarus struggling to follow the birds and fly.
&149 Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, until 11 October; Glasgow Print Studio, until 28 September.
The full article contains 1354 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
