Callum Innes
Until December 18; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

Like the slow, imperceptible movement of geological processes, Callum Innes’s paintings have changed little over the last few years. The Edinburgh-based painter, who lost out to Damien Hirst for the 1995 Turner Prize, is best known for his exposed paintings. These are large, minimalist canvasses stripped of their paint with turpentine, all washed out and dripping. So really, Innes is an un-painter.

At Ingleby a new handful of such canvasses are subtle variations on this life-long theme, each bearing a criss-cross of brush-strokes and wipe marks, drips and bleeds. It’s difficult to work out exactly how they were made: what has been applied and what removed; what has happened of its own accord and what has been shaped by the artist’s hand.

Each exposed painting is composed of two squares, side by side. One is tarry black and perfect; close up it smells richly bituminous. The other is all messed up, blurred and complicated, like real life. Looking at one of these paintings, Exposed Painting Charcoal Black, Deep Violet, think back to the two squares which hung in the very same spot last February, in the Ellsworth Kelly show.

One of Kelly’s squares was dark green and the other dark blue, both so dark that they seemed black. As your eyes tuned in, you realised that neither was truly square – their contours were convex and concave. These uncertainties relate perfectly to Innes’s work, but otherwise the two artists converge.

Kelly’s contours were hard-edged, and his colour-planes absolutely pure. It’s as if Innes has taken Kelly’s squares and applied the messy lessons of life and memory. Innes’s violet square is now a product of its own history. It’s been shaped and stained since it came into being, by other colours and materials. It bears this indelible memory in its pores, and will never be pure and uncomplicated again.

There is no simple black and white in Innes’s world. Each black is different: charcoal black, scheveningen black, vine black and ivory black. While the white ground of the paintings is allowed to remain clean and anonymous, the reverse is true in the artist’s first suite of etchings. Here, in similar compositions, the whites look dirty and aged. The blacks, on the other hand, are furry and glistening, as if soot is floating on the surface of the paper, just waiting to rub off when touched.

It’s the way Rembrandt would etch a Mondrian; the precise, colourful grids of one Dutchman made soft and velvety by the other. It feels like a moment in time; as if the paint and the turps had continued to run and pool after the moment the print was made. As if these prints are snapshots in the fluid lives of the paintings, caught in a suspended state of making and unmaking.

In the back room at Ingleby, while contemplating the exposed, raw surface of an exposed painting, my eye wandered onto the wall. For the first time I noticed a past life lurking just under the standard-issue gallery white paint: floral wall-paper, raised slightly and visible in the raking daylight. On all my previous visits I had never spotted this room’s secret history.

It’s a cliché to talk about new ways of seeing, but that’s exactly what Innes’s painting gave to me.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.11.04