By rights, these twin showings of new work by Steven Campbell should be sad affairs. The opening night last Friday fell on the first anniversary of Campbell’s death, and the painter’s absence is almost palpable. Thanks to the artist’s wild palette, his irrepressible outpouring of ideas on to canvas, and the wild imagination that informs the last works he made, though, the atmosphere at the Glasgow School of Art and the Glasgow Print Studio is not maudlin, but triumphant, a fitting coda to a career with its fair share of ups and downs.
The pleasure in Campbell’s work comes in unpicking of the arcane tangle of allusions and references that fill every corner of his densely-worked canvases, some standing in puzzling isolation, others drifting from painting to painting, offering clues to a mystery that is ultimately impossible to solve, even, one suspects for Campbell himself.
The paintings here - most, sadly, lacking Campbell’s fantastic, funny and poetic titles - are grouped into three series. In the Baby Faced Killer works, a decidedly sinister, expressionless child-man, in red shirt and riding boots, commits impossible crimes. In one, he seems to be losing a fight with two adversaries, who are wielding the dismembered limbs of a man in a yellow suit, while furniture floats around the room, as if a Victorian seance has taken a terrible turn.
In another, set in the same sitting room, the killer stares down at the yellow-suited man, whole this time, laid out on the carpet, while, for whatever reason, Victorian biographer Lytton Strachey looks on. In a third, the fugitive is brought to justice, gripped by an equally youthful detective on the sawn-off branch of a tree. The Fantômas series is, similarly, rooted in a peculiar take on detective fiction, with the Zelig-like master of disguise given a magical twist, able to merge into and emerge from his surroundings like a chameleon. The Skin paintings, inspired in part by Italian votive paintings, centre on the macabre removal of bones, with floppy figures held aloft by eagles, or lolling on the floor, their skeletons used to build ladders or furniture.
This division into three is, in part, artificial - the baby-faced killer is haunted by chairs made of bones from the Skin series, and his dismembered victim reappears alongside Fantômas - as if Campbell has conjured up a world in which to set his stories. The real world occasionally intrudes - some of the claustrophobic rooms are decorated with paintings within paintings that borrow from Jean-Michel Basquiat, a nod to Campbell’s early years in New York - but the motif that binds most of these paintings together is the Paisley pattern. The fractured narrative running through the works is held together by these aptly psychedelic swirls, with the Fantômas character donning a Paisley suit to elude his pursuers, the boneless figures of the Skin paintings resting on paisley floors, and, in a wonderfully prosaic, suburban twist, the baby-faced killer is often seen lurking beside an overstuffed wing-back chair upholstered in paisley fabric.
This shared setting for the three series only adds to the hallucinatory confusion of the work, undermining any attempt to untangle the story hidden in these works - in fact, tracing the links between each painting, it begins to look as if Campbell is having a joke at the expense of his audience, lifting a symbolic trope from one work to subvert the narrative of another.
Narrative is not quite the right word for what Campbell is up to, though. He embraces the obvious problem of storytelling in static medium, presenting vignettes that capture a single moment, leaving the viewer grasping at possible prologues and epilogues, or, with some wily tricks, embeds the passage of time in a single image. A work in the Fantômas series sees a smartly turned-out middle-aged man in a green waistcoat lunging to catch a dropped paintbrush. Behind him, caught in the same lunge, are two near-identical men, each one younger than the last. All three are propelled forward by their arms, rendered as Heath Robinson contraptions. It’s a self-portrait of sorts, in which Campbell manages to pass on a sense of his lifelong urge to paint as something irrepressible, almost beyond his control in a single deft image, one that, with a simple repetition of a figure, manages to impress a lifetime on to the surface of the canvas.
Elsewhere, Campbell squishes linear progress into a single moment.
The Childhood Bedroom of Captain Hook with Collapsible Bed, one of few titled pieces, sees our anti-hero gazing at his own reflection in a scrying mirror as his future takes place around him - the patterned carpet beneath his feet hides a smirking crocodile, and a clock ticks away in the corner. (This is a simplification - muddying the waters, as usual, Campbell’s Hook has revealed his fate by decapitating himself, allowing that prophetic, crocodile-hiding paisley pattern to gush from the veins in his neck.) These might be the last works Campbell made, but I doubt it’s the last we’ll see of him. These two shows are taken from a collection of 30 oils, and some 200 drawings that are yet to be exhibited. There are whispers, too, of a definitive retrospective, tracing Campbell’s career from the giddy heights of his early career, when he rose to fame alongside the so-called New Glasgow Boys - a glib label that, like his contemporaries Stephen Conroy, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Adrian Wisniewski, Campbell had little time for - to the recent re-evaluation of his work after a long stint in the critical wilderness, heralded by 2005’s Campbell Soup exhibit, which exposed the artist’s influence on today’s Glasgow painters. If the late, last works are anything to go by, that retrospective will reveal Campbell, for all his compositional skill, and agile handling of paint, as, above all, a storyteller.
Stephen Campbell: New Work 2006-2007 is at Glasgow School of Art until October 11 and Glasgow Print Studio until September 28th.
This review was first published in The Herald on Tuesday 19th August , 2008.