Callum Innes in London

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Alexander Adams looks at work at once austere and intense

Scottish painter Callum Innes (b. 1962) has developed a unique technique and has honed it over years. A recent display at Frith Street Gallery, London demonstrated what a degree of acuteness his vision and ability have reached. At first sight his paintings seem conventional geometric abstracts consisting of intense colour contrasted with white, painted in oil on variously sized canvases. The breaks between zones are usually straight vertical lines.

But closer inspection reveals the truth. Innes works by applying oil paint in flat coats and partially washing the wet paint off with thinner and brush, leaving areas of blank white undercoat and crisp blocks of strong colour: violet, crimson, black and other colours. Two colours plus white are the maximum range of each work, often only one colour plus white.

The washing leaves a barely evident line of stain at the edge of the uncleaned area. In fact, the washing process is never completely perfect. Minute specks are lodged in the weave of the canvas, more evident towards the edges. This gives a slightly grainy quality, especially at the edges of the picture, the way an etching plate has ink traces at its edge. At the sides of the stretched canvas, on the edges, the colourful rills, rivulets and speckling of diluted paint have an energetic, cathartic effect.

The greatness of Innes is to combine the lush intensity of colour with a severity of form. To this is added the purgative act of cleaning. The artist’s Calvinist heritage has instilled an abiding wariness of iconography. The fusion of pleasure in – and commitment to – art is foiled and heightened by moral and ethical scruples. This conflict (and balance) is the motor of Innes’s art. What he leaves behind, what he cannot bear to completely efface, is beautiful and anxious. The art is arrested process, the painting being formed by being erased. His art is moral because it confronts us with extremes: expression versus reticence, to give pleasure versus to withhold pleasure, striving for perfection versus leaving a task in an imperfect state. The space between the extremes is where the art takes place.

 As much as Innes is the inheritor of Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist religious paintings, he also the prime exponent of the transcendental landscape tradition. The intensity of his colour reflects the natural world. The delicate staining is as much a part of nature as is water. The expanses of barely modulated monochrome are equivalent to sky, sand and sea. Innes is not remaking or representing nature; he is making something akin to nature yet it is obviously the work of man. The fact that his paintings manage to be both the most beautiful and austere works of art of our era is no combination of opposites. The paintings are concrete examples of the acknowledgement not only of an individual person’s fallibility but also the persisting desire to make something sublimely perfect. They tell us about the situation that writers used to describe as ‘the human condition’.