Callum Innes: From Memory
Until November 19; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Internationally successful, the paintings of Callum Innes pop up in most major collections. While he regularly shows new work, it’s rare to see a retrospective devoted to the Edinburgh artist. And though the Fruitmarket Gallery can’t provide the space for a full-scale survey, it has gathered together a quality selection of Innes’s paintings from the past 15 years, and they look stunning in its clean-cut vistas and lofty spaces.

In the world of art, generally speaking, white is nothing, an empty starting point – the blank piece of paper, the primed canvas, the empty wall. And when a mark is made on it, that white by contrast sinks deeper into nothingness, a blank surface significant only for what is happening on top of it. That’s why Kasimir Malevich’s white on white painting was so radical in 1918, and why to many it still sounds laughable today. How can nothing on nothing become something of such great importance?

Nothing is not always white. In the world of nature, it’s harder to identify. Sometimes it’s the blue of an empty sky, but mostly it’s the black of a dark, moonless night. Black is the absence of light; the absence of a white surface on which to make marks. The only way you can make a mark in the darkness is with light itself.

That’s where film and photography come in. Unlike their counterparts in painting and drawing, nothingness for these lens-based arts is black. A white screen, a white photograph – they’re full to bursting with the active presence of light. Black, on the other hand, is a deadness, an absence.

Callum Innes by his own admission likes to look at photography more than painting. And though his paintings don’t look like photographs, they are made like them. The image, in his work, leaks through the dark, painted surface just as light burns into photosensitive paper. The more that paint is stripped away, the more something seems to reveal itself, buried in the substance of the canvas.

In 1958, Lucio Fontana first took a monochrome canvas and slashed it with a knife. Nothing was cut into nothing, and still, there in front of the viewer, was something worth looking at. On seeing this work in the late 1980s, Innes was inspired by its simplicity. Fontana had succeeded in creating an image which wasn’t on the canvas – it was in it.

That’s what Innes has been doing ever since. Working in series, he paints big, multi-layered, monochrome canvases evocative of American painters of the 1950s, and then, in parts, he strips them back to the canvas. Light and colour glow from behind the murk of dirty turpentine, far outshining the pristine whiteness of other, still primed, parts.

Every one of Innes’s paintings, though steadfastly abstract, suggests a narrative. But where Fontana’s slashed canvases were testament to a moment of vigorous, human action, Innes’s pictures suggest a more leisurely, less overtly emotional, history. A band of black, so thick and textured that it’s almost sculptural, is sliced in two. Numerous layers of colour and washes of turpentine have reduced one half to a vibrant purple shadow of its former self, the dirty turps running to the bottom of the canvas, and bleeding into the pure white band at its side.

Despite appearances, almost nothing is left to chance. The Identified Form paintings appear to have been made by blobs of turps, eating through the black ground and dripping down the canvas. In fact, Innes took his turps-loaded brush and gouged these apparently random drips upwards from the bottom. The free-flowing drips in most of his paintings are carefully channelled in the same way, and even the exuberant blood-red spatter in his shellac paintings was painted spot by deliberate spot.

Surprisingly, in the light of such careful control, Innes’s paintings exude a great deal of sensuality. Precise, hard edges of black and white nestle against blurring, bleeding flows of colour. Burning glows of rust and gold drip through thick, tarry black, like ghosts in the night. Clean linen, apparently untouched, whispers softly that it was once thick with paint.

Though Innes is best known for, and most represented by, his geometrically severe Exposed Paintings, the Fruitmarket’s show reveals a real breadth in the painter’s work. From the sensual surprise of his shellac paintings, dripping with syrupy lusciousness, to the drama of his Monologues, streaming with rivers of turps, this show travels well beyond the standard Innes fare.

With access to this broader range of his works, it becomes easier to fathom some of the mysteries of Innes’s paintings, but much remains an enigma. Whether it’s the frisson between the controlled and the sensual; or the hovering state between making and unmaking, something and nothing; there’s something in those paintings which slowly takes hold of you, and doesn’t let go.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 08.10.06