Steven Campbell: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Until September 23; Glasgow Print Studio

Taking in Steven Campbell’s new show of paintings, the product of a prolific two years, is like reading a thick book in one exhausting sitting. Picking your way through the unfolding drama, you begin to recognise the actors, their props and the unreal worlds they inhabit. But to understand them you have to leap across some great imaginary chasm, like Campbell’s old friend the Lost Hiker, ending up in a land where everything is upside down, back to front and out of proportion.

Right at the start there’s a warning. It takes the form of a painting called The Fake Through Signature. In it, a jumble of houses appears three times in different directions, and at the bottom is Cézanne’s signature, reversed, as if seen through a window. Pasted on top is a cutting from an old RA catalogue doubting the authorship of a painting attributed to Cézanne. Two of the images are imperfect reflections of the first, which is an imperfect reflection of a Cézanne, itself an idiosyncratic reflection of reality. In other words, be warned: in this show, reality is a long way off.

Campbell’s paintings are packed with an intensely personal set of symbols, in a language which is growing all the time. The most enduring of these – the Lost Hiker – is reduced to a couple of cameo appearances, but maybe that’s because you have taken his place as observer. You, this tweedy back-packed fellow, too gormless to be afraid, ramble haplessly through scenes of tragedy and comedy, seeing answers without grasping the questions. You suspect that if you survive the menace which lurks in every nook and cranny, you will find the code to crack the mysteries of the world.

Tangled in this jungle of broken signposts, it’s no wonder that Campbell has developed an interest in Rosslyn Chapel, near Penicuik. The 15th century building – legendary home of the Holy Grail – is hoaching with enigmatic symbols and clues, making it a magnet for those with an interest in the esoteric. Campbell has appropriated two of the Chapel’s most fabled features: the Prentice Pillar and the Green Man.

The Prentice Pillar, the most exquisitely carved in the whole Chapel, was said to have been created by the Master Mason’s apprentice after a dream. When the mason saw the pillar, he killed his apprentice in a fit of jealous rage. At the top of the pillar, the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac reinforces the theme of sacrifice, and in a nearby corner there’s the apprentice himself, with a gash in his forehead, looking down on his creation.

Stories of murder have never been far removed from Campbell’s work. Even in his art school days, it was the main ingredient of his performance art. In the artist’s famously dark and depressing exhibition two years ago at the Talbot Rice, mutilated corpses were everywhere.

There are still plenty of dead bodies in the artist’s new paintings, but the Prentice Pillar adds a new twist. The mason’s apprentice died for his art, but he will be revered for ever. Campbell, a self-proclaimed apprentice to Cézanne, Courbet, Monet and Ensor, has suffered too, and hopefully a piece of immortality will be his.

Around the pillar at Rosslyn winds the branches of a sacred tree, and nearby lurks the carved, grinning face of the Green Man of Knowledge, foliage sprouting from the corners of his sneer. This ancient figure represents all that is powerful about nature. He is menacing as well as generous, and above all he symbolises growth and renewal.

Back in the 1980s, one of Campbell’s recurrent motifs was a stealthy tree branch which would menace those complacent humans who thought they were in control of nature. Now, 20 years on, it takes centre stage in its full incarnation as the Green Man. In one of the most complex compositions of the whole show, The Green Man’s Twisted Eye at Rosslyn, Bosch-like visions of Hell are tumbled together with scenes of men taking axes to trees and driving stakes through human-bodied butterflies. No-one but the Green Man is smiling.

While Campbell doesn’t shy from such visions of horror, the overall feel of this show is much lighter than two years ago. He still addresses birth, death, and the general confusion which occupies the space between, but does so with a renewed spirit of playfulness.

In The Prisoners Invitational Run or The Great Escape, three prison-suited versions of Campbell are penned into a fence which for the artist symbolises death. Over the fence, a cartoon menagerie of creatures runs round in circles with athletes who will soon reappear in the Tarantino Dash as victims of a shooting. We can see the police line just beyond the finishing line and the inevitability of their fate is, like our own, absurd.

With references as disparate as Bela Lugosi, Mussolini and Jekyll and Hyde, this show is a logical expansion of Campbell’s visual vocabulary in a huge patchwork of colour and detail. It’s got it all: intellect, instinct, humour and style. Move over old masters, here comes the apprentice.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.09.04