Adrian Wiszniewski: Northern Star
Until August 27; Glasgow Print Studio

The atmosphere at Adrian Wiszniewski’s new show is electric. Neon tubes, hauled out of a dusty corner for the first time in 15 years, crackle and buzz on the walls. One of the neons – whose flaked out circuitry needs more TLC than a gallery can offer – never even made it into the show.

The artist’s opening gambit, Gentleman’s Club, hasn’t been seen since its debut in 1990. Confronting you at the entrance to the exhibition, it’s more of a keep out sign than an invitation. One wiry gentleman beats another over the head with a club (geddit?) in front of the archetypal all-seeing pyramid beloved of conspiracy theorists. Wiszniewski was fascinated with the 1980s book on which the Da Vinci code is based, revealing a secret brotherhood inside the history of art.

In 1985, within two years of leaving art school, Wiszniewski had already made it into the permanent collections of the Tate and MoMA. A high-profile swing towards figure painting connected him permanently in the public mind with his Glasgow contemporaries, Steven Campbell, Ken Currie and Peter Howson.

Perhaps reacting against this early experience of pigeon-holing, Wiszniewski has notched up an eclectic mix of techniques and styles over the last 20 years. Sometimes he indulges in the strong draughtsmanship and rich colour for which he became famous, and at others he renounces them for a more conceptual approach.

The neons represent one of these renunciations. Trying to escape from the decorative, Van Gogh-like swirls which swarmed all over his early canvases, Wiszniewski began to draw with neon tubes. Industrial material, the favourite of modernists, was hereby reclaimed in pursuit of intimate sketches.

Behind the gallery’s reception desk shines a white neon tube, twisted into the shape of handwriting. “Great Concept”, it says, “Great Idea”. Positioned where it is, the work can’t help but gently mock the gallery world. It also seems to reflect on its own status as conceptual art, having stretched the line as far as it can go from its starting point in Wiszniewski’s atmospheric, painterly canvases.

Blast marks Wiszniewski’s even earlier rebellion against colour in 1986. Consciously devoid of painterly depth, the oil is a huge series of nervous twitches on white, like a frame from a cheaply printed comic. Its movement away from rich colour to sinewy line puts it in the same category as the neon works, prioritising idea over style, but Wiszniewski is at his best when his Great Concepts are realised in a blaze of colour.

With the exception of Blast and the neons, the rest of the work is new. Wiszniewski prides himself on fast working, and most of the pastels and paintings have been made in the last month, if not the last week, before the show. Most of these are of bathers, a common theme among artists 100 years ago. There are Picasso’s famous bathers, and those of Cezanne, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin and many others.

Picasso’s influence is unmistakeable in Wiszniewski’s pastel heads, such as the china-skinned little Bather with his typically expressionless face. Gauguin’s bold compositions are recalled in the stark colours and forms of Bathers Before a Poppy Sky. The largest of Wiszniewski’s new works, Large Bathers, is all his own, but it’s not his best. There are some beautifully lyrical passages, such as the nude glimpsed through the translucent leg of a ghostly bather, but the rhythm is broken by over-painted alterations which are just too intrusive, a downside of Wiszniewski’s intuitive way of working.

Wiszniewski’s success is based on a balance of the painterly with the symbolic, and of ideas with intuition. This show is a much odder combination: hissing neons of the 1980s and early 1990s, dug out of the basement, are thrown together with a rash of speedily-produced bathers of early to mid 2005. Old and new. Line and colour. Water and electricity. What a dangerous mix.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 31.07.05