After a brief tussle with notoriety in 1987 (due to an allegedly over-familiar rendition of the Queen Mother), Alison Watt has, in the years since, steadily built up a reputation based on her painting alone. She’s moved through nudes in stark surroundings, to nudes surrounded by swathes of fabric, and on to diptychs of figures complementing and contrasting with cloth.
And now, with her solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Watt has pushed the human form out of the frame entirely, painting monumental canvases of ruched, pleated and folded fabric, patterned and plain. This almost obsessional treatment of a subject usually confined to the margins of portraiture is down to the influence of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the nineteenth century neo-classicist upbraided in his day for favouring gowns and drapes over the sitter. Watt’s debt to Ingres is clear in the subtle handling of tonal shifts, depiction of lush designs and, not least, her consummate skill with oils. The meticulous arrangements of fabric are as far from an unmade bed as you can imagine, and they pack a double punch.
Viewed from afar, the works seem strikingly cold and mannered, even when evoking the distinctly human creases of flesh. They are, in a sense, pornographic, as opposed to erotic; like the forms of Japanese bondage art where the tying of a knot is foregrounded, and the captive ignored. Not that Watt has a fabric fetish, rather the overwhelming detail; with each soft shadow and sharp crimp exquisitely rendered, the act of painting serves to overwhelm the subject.
Moving closer, the slick surface sheen is stripped away and Watt returns to the intimacy of portraiture. This is, in effect, a closer reading of Watt’s response to Ingres, and, conversely, a move away from his influence. While the paintings show a sensual regard for the material, just as Ingres emphasised the feminine by drawing the eye away from flesh to fabric, they also embrace an abstract clash of textures, as oddly jarring fast strokes cut through calm, flat planes.
In the end, these new works are a wonderful mess of contradictions that can never be smoothed out. It is impossible not to get lost in Watt’s paradoxically neat tangle of ideas - whether it’s her dialogue with Ingres or the almost alarming duality of photorealistic illusion and sheer physicality.