Janice McNab
Until February 21; Talbot Rice

If I hear the phrase “post-9/11” one more time I’m going to explode (not literally, Mr Blunkett). Apart from providing the West with a blanket excuse to curtail civil liberties, increase insurance costs and deepen institutionalised intolerance, it’s all too often applied to art which is dealing with age-old issues of collective anxiety.

In the case of Janice McNab’s new paintings, however, the allusion is hard to avoid. Empty aeroplane seats, grounded and static, are disturbingly devoid of human presence. The modern dream of flight and freedom has become a claustrophobic nightmare, dislocated and rearranged in a cluttered prop storeroom. That nightmare is alleviated for some in the perverse pleasure of the flotation tank, a tiny dark space where you are locked away from the real world.

These tanks and aeroplane seats form the core of McNab’s new solo show. Apart from three oddly incongruent paintings, the exhibition is focused and controlled, harbouring a host of issues – both contemporary and timeless – under the skilfully executed surface of the pictures.

While McNab works from informal, flash-lit photographs of her subject-matter, the results are lent an air of legitimacy and monumentality by virtue of being oil-painted. Up close, the handling is rough and relatively loose; a few steps back the paintings look photo-realistic, and from the balcony they look like real photos. The tanks and chairs in themselves are pretty drab, and it is this careful treatment which makes us look again.

Perhaps it is also the use of a historic medium which gives the strong impression of portraiture; Chairs 3 is like a double-portrait. Chair 5 is a full-length portrait of a rather chirpy looking chair whose arms seem to be gesticulating. Even the flotation tanks have smiley faces. But there is also a discernable sense of ghostly human presence in these paintings; the worn imprint of thousands of passengers is there on the chairs, and we have no idea whether there are people in the flotation tanks or not. We would rather not imagine people in Chairs 1, where the chaotic arrangement suggests an accident to our disaster-prone imaginations (post-you-know-what).

Apart from all of this, the real nub of McNab’s work is conceit. The conceit of paint itself, as I have described, and also the kinds of conceit we accommodate in life – like willingly believing you’re in a lush spring meadow when in fact you’re floating in a small plastic box. There is often a creeping sense that something is not quite right, where for instance large airy windows form an incongruous backdrop to carefully aligned aeroplane seats.

Such questions of duplicity are raised more explicitly upstairs, in a series of paintings of the set for Eastenders: despite their familiarity, none of these places are real, evidenced by the electric cables in Walford Market and the modified tables in the E20 (a nightclub which, incidentally, Billy torched during McNab’s opening). Still, we attach human significance to the uninhabited objects and spaces we see in the paintings, investing the mundane and impersonal with drama and sentiment.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 25.01.04