Visual arts review: Steven Campbell

Published on Monday 27 July 2009 19:57

STEVEN CAMPBELL: WRETCHED STARS, INSATIABLE HEAVEN… NEW WORK 2006-7 **** MARLBOROUGH FINE ART, 6 ALBEMARLE STREET, LONDON

WHEN Steven Campbell died in August 2007, he was working on a major new body of work for an exhibition which would be shared between his alma mater, Glasgow School of Art, and Glasgow Print Studio. The exhibition went ahead last summer as a tribute, showing a handful of the new paintings alongside older work, but the new work has not been shown in its entirety until now.

Even here, filling London's Marlborough Gallery, the show is not complete. There is room for 22 large canvases on the walls, but still there are more in storage. Such was Campbell's renewed vigour that these are the work of a little over a year, and they are more vigorous, strange and experimental than ever.

From the moment you walk through the gallery door, you are plunged into the strange, vibrant Campbell imagination. Figures are stumbling, diving, falling. Objects tilt, topple, cascade. It's a precarious world, poised between adventure and disaster.

Several of these paintings show a figure – the artist himself or one of his alter-egos – shielding himself against an assault of falling books. In one case, hands are even emerging from a bookcase to lob them at him. Soon, the viewer starts to understand how he is feeling, caught in a downpour of fierce, fertile ideas.

When Campbell finished a body of work, he would sit at his kitchen table and give each its rambling, inventive title, often as puzzling as the work itself. He did not have the chance to name these works – most are simply listed as part of the relevant series. But he did name the show. "Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heavens" is a line from Monteverdi's Orfeo, placing it in an ongoing drama of life and death.

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to find premonitions of mortality in these paintings. Death was always an interest of Campbell's, from murder scenes to horror movies. The energy of these works is of an artist striving with renewed vigour. If there is a premonition here, it is the Gaviscon bottle which appears unobtrusively in several works. It became Campbell's companion, relieving what he believed was a minor problem. By the time it revealed its seriousness – a ruptured appendix – it was too late.

Campbell's imagination was fed by many things, by movies and books (Fantmas, the "evil genius" of French silent movies, is a key player this show), by moments of the everyday, by ideas, psychology, fairy tales. Neil Mulholland's homage to him at Glasgow International in 2005 was called Campbell's Soup, and soup is a good word for it. He boiled all this up in the pressure cooker of his studio. We consumed the results.

He was always concerned with dialogue with the artists of the past. In his "Master and Apprentice" show in 2004, he paid tribute to them, while placing his own works alongside them. He styled himself as a romantic; it was how he dressed, how he worked and how he appeared within his works.

That could lead to the accusation that he ignored modernism, a figurative painter reviving a tradition which the modernists overturned. But in these works, more than ever, he engages more directly with the moderns, and he does it with typical Campbell complexity.

Colourful abstract paintings appear in the background of several of his works. In another, a sequence of geometric abstracts with some resemblance to Mondrian get increasingly smaller until they disappear from view. In Portrait of the Lost Travelogue Writer, the central figure stumbles into a landscape full of iconic buildings, watched by three lolling Picasso-like heads.

His relationship with pattern might be understood in this context. The modernists, of course, railed against any aspect of decoration. In many of these works, Campbell lets the decorative run riot, a torrent of brightly coloured Paisley pattern that threatens to submerge his objects and figures.

In Untitled II from the "Fantmas" series, the artist lunges after his dropped paintbrush, even as it sprinkles white paint over a vibrant Paisley carpet. Another waistcoated artist figure clasps his forehead in despair as the pattern starts to subsume him.

Decoration and figuration are pitched at one another in a colourful squabble. Campbell's questions are at least as vibrant as his answers.

To look hard at Campbell's work is to confront contradictions. For all that vividness and calamity, he retains a strong sense of composition. His busy pictures draw your eye everywhere at once, yet they still have focus. His work defies attempts to reduce it to narrative, yet every element is there for a reason.

His works are never only about exploring the material quality of paint, yet he delighted in it. One must only look carefully at the range of skin tones on a (peripheral) reclining nude; the colours worked into a set of bare floorboards; the clearly resolved still life in the bottom left-hand corner of Untitled III from the "Fantomas Series", to see what a very fine painter he is.

In several works here, he uses the application of glazes to experiment with a kind of optical illusion. A figure appears to have more than one set of eyes, and we peer at it as if the canvas has been jogged and we are seeing double. For me, it calls to mind the distorted skull which appears in Holbein's famed portrait The Ambassadors, put there by an artist at the height of his powers for a variety of reasons, but partly at least because he could.

Campbell also undercuts the seriousness of his dramas with humour. A gathering of artists around a campfire is disrupted when one sets his dandy little beard alight. In the act of trying to put it out, another sets fire to his own. A figure, fragmenting in mid-air, still clutches a mirror, although he no longer has a face. A chair appears to scurry away on its ornate clawed feet.

When any artist dies, questions arise about how to engage with their work in the absence of the person who made them. This is true of every artist, even those who distance themselves from their oeuvre, as Campbell did not. The loss of an artist should prompt a new surge of critical engagement and inquiry.

There is much to examine in Campbell's work, and it is to be hoped that writers and critics will rise to the challenge (for challenge it is) in the coming years.

This triumphant last exhibition serves to remind us of the quality and quantity of the work he produced in his all too short 25 years as an artist. And it is the best argument to date for a major retrospective in which that body of work can be fully appreciated.

It is to be hoped that we have a gallery in Scotland ready to rise to that challenge.

&#149 Until 31 July