Art review: Drowned Dust, Sudden Word

THERE is a moment, in the short information film that goes with Tony Swain’s new exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery which makes my heart stop.

It’s when the artist and gallery technicians are shown hanging the four-metre wide painting entitled As Well. No great achievement for an experienced gallery team you might think. However, this work is not on canvas or board, but painted on ordinary sheets of a daily newspaper, torn and stuck together (the artist describes this method as “pieced”) and displayed unmounted and unframed.

To hang one of Swain’s paintings means a little act of flipping the painting from the horizontal to the vertical and then gently pressing it to the wall. There is, the film reveals, a little jiggery-pokery with blue tack and tape too. The whole painting dances for a moment like a butterfly in the breeze and then… phew, it’s there.

You would think all of this might give your average conservator a bit of a nightmare, but it doesn’t seem to have put institutional collectors off. These days Swain’s delicate works can be found in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in our own National Galleries.

In fact it’s the very contrast between the wafer-thin physical qualities of newsprint and the complex, impossible worlds that Swain’s paintings portray, and the fraught relationship between disposability and permanence, that give them their peculiar power.

Like newspaper, Swain’s art is flexible, impermanent but curiously robust, and it packs in a heck of a lot of information. There are 21 works in this show alone, all produced this year.

Swain was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, studied at Glasgow School of Art and was one of the artists who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007. His painting seems borne of a private world and his own personal rituals, a Guardian to read each morning and a painting made seemingly with the materials most easily to hand.

But it would be wrong to imagine that art that touches on the question of disposability is in itself disposable. Looking at Swain’s work you are reminded not of early 20th-century collage, of agit-prop or arte povera, but of certain historical paintings, which seem to share a quality of being slightly out of step with their times.

In his vast, depopulated landscapes, like the work Five Die Cutting Star, where palm trees fringe high mountains of alpine proportions, or The Flavours Disappear, where the shipping containers of Felixstowe are transformed into futuristic buildings on island cities, you catch a whiff of the apocalyptic vision of 19th century religious artist John Martin, where landscape is permeable and unstable.

In his claustrophobic still lives and interiors you sense Vuillard, an artist who turned indoors when most of France looked out to the street, and whose marks constantly hovered between depicting things and being a thing in themselves.

In the works that seem to refer to Surrealist art they are in the tradition of the late, lyrical, pastoral strains that took root in England rather than the early and confrontational politics of continental Europe.

And this sense that time is out of joint is there in the painter’s stubborn resistance to using printed matter for its content rather than its appearance. The pages Swain chooses to paint on are chosen not for their text for their political subjects or satirical potential, but for the opportunity they provide for modification.

In practical terms this means he likes to paint on and over the green sward of golf courses, football pitches and lush tropical travel spreads. Coastlines, mountains and seas get his attention, but above all it’s the vast emptied landscapes of urban patterns, and the wastelands of climate change and natural disaster, that seem most to chime with his intentions.

From these existing images Swain creates infinite worlds, with unnatural vistas, unexpected recessions and impossible topographies. A piece of hessian becomes a desert, a desert becomes a rain-soaked shore, and a man seems to have become a tree.

Whilst his smaller works – First Time With A Lasso, for example, with its pencilled grid and constructivist architecture – invite you to look, the larger of Swain’s work invite you almost to read them.

As Well, despite its scale, has no clear perspective, nor a single area of focus; instead you can almost move along it from left to right, like a manuscript, fluctuating between painted and printed marks. It’s a landscape of water and paddy fields, small patches of devastation and drought, the weather pattern clipped from a newspaper forecast. Your eye meanders as though following a river; your mind is restless too.

There’s darkness to much of this. Whether it’s the sinister sci-fi gleam of a work like Put Ashore At His Own Request or the tsunami-wrecked devastation of Swarm And Scold, there’s a sense of light ebbing away, a looming darkness in the corner, a glowering sky above. Swain seems a complex, melancholy artist in a shiny age: perhaps reading the newspaper everyday makes you thus. «

Until 8 July