Black Marks is Alex Pollard’s first major outing in Scotland since he re­p­res­en­ted Scotland at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Then, Pollard’s work focussed firmly on his own practice and on the making of art in general, with explicit re­f­er­ences to art-his­t­or­ic­al movements. In Wall Drawing, he crafted hands from rulers which made marks on the gallery wall, oc­ca­sion­ally erasing their mistakes. For Figures, he borrowed from Futurist collage and painting, sculpting fighting figures from perfect copies of Staedtler pencils. His Beasts were dinosaurs with more rulers for limbs, presented on parodies of museum display tables.

At first glance, Pollard’s new work at Talbot Rice looks to be an about face, with its re­f­er­ences to clowns and clowning, the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, David Bowie’s early ’80s adoption of that costume, and the New Romantic movement’s in­ter­gender­ed poses. As the ex­hib­i­tion reveals itself, though, it seems that Pollard, while he has looked beyond the studio for in­spir­a­tion, is up to his old tricks.

Night­s­cape is an obvious reprise of Wall Drawing, but where his earlier piece saw art making itself, Pollard now has the gallery putting its face on, ready for a night on the town. Eyebrow pencils are elongated, un­du­lat­ing across the walls like eyebrows, cul­min­at­ing in mucky smudges. Black lipsticks are studded about the walls, as are convex make-up mirrors which lend visitors leaning in for a closer look a reflected touch of glamour. And, just as a mask of make-up is wiped away after a night on the town or on the stage, so Night­s­cape will be painted over at the ex­hib­i­tion’s close.

Those mirrors also provide a preview in miniature of Clown Medal­lions, a set of metre-wide com­me­m­or­at­ive bronzes that feature the faces of clowns, some happy, some sad. The mo­nu­ment­al heft of these sculp­tures is un­der­mined by their scrappy, un­fin­ished surfaces - the clowns look to have been cast from hasty attempts to form faces from squishy globs of broken lipstick, their ex­pres­sions im­pos­s­ible to read.

Next, a series of portraits titled Romos Getting Ready sees shattered pencils stuck to grubby boards, ephemeral studies of temporary iden­tit­ies made from both the tools of Pollard’s trade, and the Romo’s too.

The New Romantics are a good match for Pollard’s practice, which always mingles winking humour with rigourous ex­am­in­a­tion. With hindsight they may appear as daft as the brick­lay­ers in drag of Glam Rock, but the movement’s un­der­ground be­gin­n­ings were genuinely tran­s­gress­ive, inspired by pol­it­i­cised ‘gender­fuck­’ drag acts and reacting against the decidedly masculine ag­gres­sion of late punk by putting on a show. The nightclubs namecheck­ed in Neil Mul­hol­land’s in­tro­duc­tion to the ex­hib­i­tion - St. Moritz, Le Kilt, Le Beetroot - are, too, a reminder that the first New Romantics were a dis­t­inc­tly self-aware, silly-serious bunch, eager to undermine their ap­par­ently po-faced the­at­ric­al­ity. Bowie’s clowning on the cover of Ashes to Ashes is another perfect fit for Pollard’s looping game of reference and counter-reference: he borrowed his look from the New Romantics, who had borrowed their look from him.

In the upstairs gallery, Pollard brings on the clowns again with a set of dim, mono­chrome paintings, a series of fades to grey. Clown is a Pierrot’s body with a thick pencil for a head, Profile is a Medusa-like figure, its snaking hair made up of distorted, twisting pencils, its body the jumbled contents of a make-up bag.

At this point, it becomes clear that Pollard’s new set of in­flu­ences rest on an interest in tran­s­form­a­tion, with the tran­s­form­a­tion of a face with make-up allied to the tran­s­form­a­tion of materials into works of art. The meta­mor­ph­os­ing, half-finished figures in Pollard’s paintings also point to his interest in artifice - he doesn’t just use artist’s materials in his work, he crafts im­macu­late copies of artist’s materials - and his incessant ques­tion­ing of the status of objects, an implicit challenge to the viewer still un­com­fort­able with Duchamp’s legacy. The clown is also an ambiguous figure, en­ter­tain­ing and inspiring fear in equal measure, thanks to the grinning or maudlin mask that makes it im­pos­s­ible to guage true emotion. In looking to the clown, Pollard sheds light on his own in­s­ist­ence on making ambiguous work with his eyebrow per­man­ently raised, hinting that the wit inherent in his sculp­tures, paintings and drawings is intended to reinforce, not undermine his in­vest­ig­a­tions into his own practice.

Black Marks is a subtle, multi-layered body of work, then. It might lack the immediacy and instant gra­t­i­fic­a­tion of Pollard’s previous work, but this is no bad thing - by stepping out of his studio and into the nightclubs of the 1980s, the circus and the theatre, he has made a body of work that is richer, more con­tem­plat­ive and, ul­ti­m­ately, more rewarding.

This review was first published in The Herald on 11th May, 2007.