Toby Paterson
Until January 9 2005; Tate St Ives

Toby Paterson likes to cut things fine. Yesterday, the young Glasgow artist unveiled two new site-specific works at Tate St Ives. Two weeks ago, he was still trying to figure out what they would be.

“I’ve not made the work yet,” he told me from his studio above Glasgow’s Modern Institute. “I still don’t really know what’s going on with it. I’ve got a week: three days for each one. And course having decided on a really tricky site, there’s all manner of health and safety issues; I’m using a spray gun and they’re having kittens about that.”

Paterson was invited to choose a space in the modern building at St Ives which would house his art for three months. Rather than choose one of the gallery spaces, he opted for the cylindrical stairwell which leads up to the café. He clearly had a strong vision of how his work would fit in. “If you look at my work,” he says, seeing it in his mind’s eye, “it sort of flies out over this stairwell, and then you turn round 180 degrees and there’s this incredible view, due west, straight out to the sea.”

At 30 years old, Paterson is fast becoming ubiquitous. Winner of the Becks Futures award in 2002, he enjoyed wide critical acclaim for his solo show at CCA last year. He has a solo show in Paris opening this week, a show in California next month, and a big one-man exhibition at the Barbican in February. The Home Office has commissioned a work for its prestigious new HQ, and Paterson has also been asked to decorate the high speed rail terminal at Ashford, Kent.

“The nose is firmly to the grindstone” says the artist. “I’m really bad at saying no to things, but it’s hard when everything that comes down the pipe is actually really good!”

One of the reasons why Paterson’s work is so well-suited to public building projects is its roots in modernist urban architecture. A keen skateboarder, he spent his youth sweeping through the plazas of Richard Seifert – architect of London’s Centrepoint – and other modernist spaces which have long lost their initial sheen of utopianism. “Those spaces had a real impact on me as a kid,” he explains. “I’m making work to try and think my way through these things”.

One of the Modernists who influenced a whole generation of artists was Victor Pasmore. Although Paterson was sceptical about his work to begin with, he has become increasingly enthused, and has even got to know Pasmore’s son. A Pasmore relief has been borrowed from the Tate’s central collection to accompany the young artist’s work.

When Paterson got to St Ives a week ago, his first task was to spray two large clouds of colour onto the stair walls – a departure from his usual clean lines. He tells me he was inspired by the Brian Eno song, Sky Saw, that’s been playing in his studio: “All the clouds turn to words, all the words float in sequence, no one knows what they mean, everyone just ignores them”. It’s a good get-out clause, he quips, if no-one likes the work.

In preparation for these wall paintings, Paterson took a Ben Nicholson painting, Tuscan Relief, as his starting point. Nicholson, a central figure in the St Ives School of artists was, along with Henry Moore, considered to be the quintessential British Modernist.

I have to persuade Paterson to let me name the painting. “I wouldn’t want people to go and look at the work and start treating it like a jigsaw,” he explains. “The process had three layers to it, so they’d be quite hard pushed without seeing my original scribbles to work out where it came from.”

Dating from 1967, Tuscan Relief is one of Nicholson’s late works. “It’s from that period,” explains Paterson, “when formally so many artists of that generation had had their ideas corrupted and applied in a hotchpotch decorative way… like architects getting all excited and making a wee bit of sculpture. I’ve always been fascinated by that process of bastardisation.”

Paterson has carried out some bastardisation of his own by “re-mixing” Tuscan Relief into an imaginary building plan. In fact he has created an elaborate system for turning the original painting into an artwork far removed from its source. In doing this he is playing with the principles of process art, a movement in the 1960s and 70s which valued the process of creation over any subjective choices the artist might make – a kind of doctrine of predestination for artworks.

Process-based art “has this pretence of absoluteness or absolutism about it that I can’t really live with,” Paterson explains, “so in a way it’s a self-defeating system that I’ve used to make these images.”

Although he enjoys playing with such approaches, he’s by no means a whole-sale convert to process art, to Modernism, or indeed to the work of Ben Nicholson. “I guess it’s me kicking all these ideas around and seeing what happens when you jam a couple of things together.”

Having created his imaginary building plan, Paterson’s next step was to make isometric drawings from it, like those you see in architectural proposals. At this point he allowed himself some subjectivity by selecting his favourite images for use in the two final wall paintings. These are what he’s been painting, on top of the clouds of colour, over the last few days.

With the the paint barely dry, and the unveiling over, you’d think it was time for Paterson to have a well-earned rest. So, what’s the artist got planned for today? “I go straight to Paris,” he says, “where I’ve got two wall paintings to make there as well…”

Catrìona Black,10.10.04