George Shaw: What I did this Summer
Until March 21; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Sometimes I look at contemporary art, so rooted in today’s way of thinking, and worry that future generations will fail to understand it. Now, for the first time, it’s happened the other way around. On seeing young English painter George Shaw’s solo show at DCA, I wonder if a 22nd century audience will understand it better.

Shaw’s subject is the 1970s suburban housing scheme that formed the backdrop to his adolescence. These boxy houses, grey streets and starved woods happen to belong to Coventry, but they are so like every other unremarkable suburb I’ve ever seen or lived in that I have to fight the instinct to walk right past them. I wonder if Vermeer had this trouble when he painted The Little Street, creating an unassuming window on a typical Amsterdam neighbourhood, and I think how much we love that painting now that its contents have lost their familiarity.

The environments Shaw depicts – wet tarmac, a muddy swing-park, dilapidated garage doors – are the landscapes we don’t bother fixing in our minds. Most of us are too used to these scenes to view them objectively; we can’t see the wood for the trees. That’s why a future audience might judge these works more successfully than we can.

Painting the unspeakably mundane is not a new concept; but for it to work, the artist must find a way to haul their subject matter into a new realm of ideas, or even of beauty, just like Vermeer did. Shaw does a bit of both, but elusively.

The artist’s medium of choice is certainly part of his message: he paints with Humbrol enamel, that stuff of airfixed boyhood nostalgia. These awkward model paints conjure up memories of the small, obsessive world Shaw inhabited as a teenager. The results are compulsively meticulous, and oppressively dull, much like the scenes depicted. Every leaf and brick is delineated individually, and the paintings’ saturated surfaces seem to suck light out of the air, leaving themselves permanently in shadow.

In fact, this work would fit more comfortably in some cramped, artificially lit suburban interior, and it’s not often I say this, but DCA has too much space and light for this exhibition. The small, dark paintings are dwarfed in the big gallery, and they disappear into themselves in the light of day.

Although beauty is not Shaw’s endgame, there are touches of magic here and there. The cherry blossom and daisies are a pure delight in Blossomiest Blossom, and even cheer up the adjacent semi-detached, its wood panels shining in the springtime sun. In Late, the last rays of evening sun capture a silver birch in all its fiery glory behind a row of lonely garages.

That said, it’s unlikely to be the sun-tipped trees that caught the attention of the curators at DCA; it was probably the unreal atmospheres of the paintings, where time seems stretched and reduced simultaneously. These places are curiously unoccupied, as if Shaw has caught them on a break from their official duties. Their titles provide time of day, and time of year, but there is still a sense that the specific moments are made up, in homage to the countless real moments which have gone by unnoticed.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.02.04