Art review: To Have a Voice, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art

The GSA graduate Alex Dordoy has just finished a show at the Modern Institute. In April the painters Merlin James and Carol Rhodes will mount an exhibition, Ever Since I put Your Picture In A Frame, for the Glasgow International (GI) festival that will bring together contemporary painters from Scotland, including Louise Hopkins and Richard Walker, with key contemporary artists like Alex Katz and historical figures like James Pryde and Walter Sickert.

And then there’s this; To Have A Voice collects seven painters in what seems like the biggest group painting show I can recall seeing at Glasgow School of Art since Campbell’s Soup, Neil Mulholland’s polemical tribute to Stephen Campbell at the GI festival back in 2005.

Curated by GSA’s Jenny Brownrigg, this is a dark, funny, physically impressive exhibition: full of big-brushed, fast-moving paint and figures that seem largely unresolved and unstable in the best possible way. This is painting of ideas, of emerging and receding images. If portraiture can fix the human figure in time and place, these are artists who want to mess with time and place altogether.

To Have A Voice is a figurative painting show, but it seems that many of the figures are figments, ghosts and cyphers rather than portraits. This is not a show that celebrates realism but a show that recognises the punchy, condensed power of making things up. It suggests that the figures in these paintings are characters in search of words, archetypes in search of myths or histories that have not quite been written down yet.

The latter is most true in the two full-length figure paintings and one small head from the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. I remember seeing her work when she was an emerging artist in New Contemporaries at the Liverpool Biennial back in 2004, and being bowled over by her bluntness and conviction.

Yiadom-Boakye comes from a Ghanaian family and her art seeks to position a new art history of Africans and the African diaspora in the context of European painting. But there’s nothing rhetorical or clinical about her project. This is not observational painting. Her art, she has said, “is more about humanity than humans”.

Her figures – intense women, who might be soul or jazz singers or the subject of their songs, or young men picked from colonial or missionary histories – have a poetic conviction about them, a fictional intensity. All are invented from multiple sources and bear no obvious clues as to their setting or historical period.

Against dark backgrounds her figures emerge briskly and are energetically physical. Confidences is two young men in vests and shorts leaning together intimately to talk. A Head For Poison shows a glamorous but possibly tragic woman the whites of her eyes, singing out from the canvas: a glimpse, a gleam. These are paintings that grab you and hold you with their authority.

Yiadom-Boakye’s female figures often have a kind of ferocity, but fierce would be a terrible understatement for a series of works by Edinburgh-based Moyna Flannigan, who taught in the painting department at GSA for many years.

Her three large paintings each show a towering female figure amidst a weird and blasted coastal landscape. The women are archetypes: a giant rampaging colossus in striped trousers who holds a clutch of screaming figures in her grip, a bosomy goddess in tight white flares with a fag hanging from her mouth and what might be burning ember in her hand, and a purple-hued amazon who might be Lara Croft in her twilight years.

It’s not very clear where these women are: murderous Medeas or Mothers Courage, they might be emerging from the sea, running over hot coals or simply stumbling around in an infernal chaos of their own making. With their enormous limbs, big busts and raddled make-up they certainly seem to be causing trouble.

I love the way that Flannigan’s figures seem to expand from a single point, in the way that a genie escapes from a bottle, or a balloon inflates when filled with air. It’s technically dizzying but also seems to be an apt demonstration of the process itself; these terrifying women all begin with the same small act of placing a brush, the imaginative construction of these characters all drawing from the tiniest of thoughts and physical gestures.

It’s a world away from Flannigan to Hernan Bas’s dreamy introverted young men, but the show implies they are equally invented. Bas uses a huge array of painting materials that are eventually subsumed under a bright varnish surface. His art references gay culture, lush symbolic fiction and European sensibility set under the density of American skies.

There’s a figure on a cane chair in what might be a conservatory or a bit of lush jungle. He is young and dreamy, but also chair-bound. He seems old and young at the same time, like a composite of the young Tadzio, the golden Polish boy in Death In Venice, and von Aschenbach, the ailing and obsessive dying man who observes him.

Bas’s boys seem always on the edge of dissolving or falling into other more exotic but possibly harsher worlds. One figure sits outside a wooden house reading a book. Everything around him seems to waver and totter, as though opening the page has opened a door on to an alternative universe.

There are some works here that don’t quite add up. Gideon Rubin’s slidey whites, umbers and ochres over big areas of primed but often unpainted linen are poetic but somehow oddly unpleasant. There is uniformity to the works, in his sludgy palette on show and, in particular, in the fact that he has erased the face of his subjects. This means that his raw material, found photographs which appear to be mainly from family albums, is oddly colonised and somehow dishonoured by his attention.

A small boy scratches his arm anxiously. A girl poses in her best white dress, with a collie dog at her elbow. Another boy wobbles slightly as he sits on a diving board over a pool. Rubin knows how to push the paint around, but his device of placing a big ellipse where a face should be seems to create too obvious a metaphor for the kind of loss that occurs both in the passage of time and in the translation of people into paintings. There’s something oddly cruel and self-regarding in his actions.

On balance, though, this is a great show – fierce, analytical and physical. It makes you excited to be around painting, and excited that painting is still around. «

Until 31 March. www.gsa.ac.uk