Preview: Steven Campbell: “… Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven…” New Work 2006-2007
Glasgow School of Art 16 August – 11 October
Glasgow Print Studio 16 August – 28 September

A young man sits on air. His head has been cut from his green-shirted body, and lolls, a few inches out of kilter, on a plate. With an inscrutable, dinner-party gaze, he lifts his left hand and plunges a dinner fork into his head. Out from between the glossy strands of his hair issues a curling tongue of gloopy blood. In his right hand, he holds a bloody knife.

The Childhood Bedroom Of Captain Hook With Collapsible Bed is one of the three oil paintings in Steven Campbell’s studio to which he gave a title before he died. The rest of the 11 canvases are sadly left untitled. Seven of these will go on show (as originally planned) at Glasgow School of Art, and the other four at Glasgow Print Studio.

Campbell liked to play games in his paintings, and with their names. He was, in the words of his friend, the writer Barry Yourgrau, “monstrously silly and existential”. Each title is an absurd, often comical clue, but at the same time, you get the feeling that it’s a signpost cheekily swivelled just before you arrived on the scene. “They are this incredible whodunnit,” says John Mackechnie, director of Glasgow Print Studio, as we puzzle over the paintings. “It gives you all the parts and you’ve got to try and unravel it. It’s just about impossible.”

Let’s try anyway. Captain Hook was of course Peter Pan’s nemesis. Campbell was fond of literary villains: Béla Lugosi featured heavily in his last show, in his role as Count Dracula; new to this show will be the ground-breaking arch-villain of early 20th century French crime novels, Fantômas.

Confusingly, our young man eating himself looks nothing like Captain Hook – his fresh face, tweed jacket, buttoned-up shirt, and ironed jeans have no hint of the pirate about them. Neither does this appear to be the pirate’s bedroom – it resembles, by all accounts, Campbell’s own studio.

But the place in the painting is no real life space. Its floor is a writhing mass of swirls, chronically infected by a paisley pattern caught from Campbell’s work of 2005. While awaiting, with great excitement, a visit to John Byrne, the artist had painted a canvas swarming with paisley-inspired psychedelia (Waiting – Byrnicus Paisleycus Virus Invading Mr Gray).

These swirling blobs of colour make regular appearances in Campbell’s new work, and in one untitled painting from the Baby Face Killer series, the pattern seeps off the trousers of a distressed character, gathering around his foot. Becoming bigger, bolder and more viscous, they reveal themselves as blobs of paint on a palette knife. A ghostly murder victim lies nearby. Whodunnit? It appears that the artist did it, in his studio, with a palette knife.

Back in Hook’s bedroom, the paisley globules camouflage a crocodile against the carpet. The creature lurks, hoping for another bite at the pirate (it was a crocodile which ate Hook’s right hand). A grandfather clock hovers flatly in the corner like something from a Matisse which has wandered mistakenly into three dimensions – this is the clock that the crocodile ate, its ticking a warning to Hook that he is being stalked.

It’s fair to conclude that this painting symbolises the artist, digging into his own head for material, and stalked by a lurking something which wants to eat him too (Would that be me?). But however much you play Sherlock Holmes with Campbell’s pictures, it’s usually your instinct that leads you closest to an explanation. That’s because Campbell painted intuitively, allowing the contents of his head to spill out onto the canvas. The composition might be impeccable; the cultural references many and varied; but chiefly it was “his mad moon-touched imagination and soul”, in Yourgrau’s words, which led the way.

Over the years, Campbell’s canvases have become busier, loaded with people, things and ideas accumulated along the way. “It’s just so full of content,” says Mackechnie, “and you’re not sure if it’s all related, or if they just happened to be things he liked at the time. You suspect not – that there’s actually a rationale for everything.”

Bit by bit, Campbell built up his own eclectic visual language. A red and blue plastic mac turned up in paintings around 2001, after the artist found one in the woods, like some vital clue to a nasty murder. The ancient Green Man brought his menacing grin to paintings in 2004, when Campbell took an interest in Rosslyn Chapel. This new group of paintings introduces new, ambiguous symbols, including chairs of every shape and size: one tall and colourful, one made from human bones, and several which float upside down, or are completely invisible.

Most prominent among the chairs is the high-backed blue armchair. It moves around like a leading character amongst the carnage of the Baby Face Killer series. “He had this idea of an artist’s chair,” says Mackechnie. “That’s his chair, in theory – I don’t think it was quite like that but he did have a chair.” Perhaps it represents the artist, present in the room but not visible to the naked eye. In one image a seated figure – very like Campbell – does leak into view like a momentary mirage.

Whether it’s baby-faced killers, French serial killers, or an annoyed swarm of bees, nowhere is totally safe in the netherworld of Campbell’s paintings. Mundane family life is separated only by the thinnest of skins from a land of chaos; from evil villains, and from landscapes and buildings out to get revenge on unsuspecting humans.

“They all have a bit of an edge in them,” says Mackechnie, “something a little bit disturbing going on.” A family gathers quietly around the television in an untitled image from the Fantômas series, ignorant of the chasm opening up above them to an unseen world of violence and destruction. You can’t help but think of Campbell’s own family, rocked by the shock of his sudden cruel death.

When I meet with Mackechnie, these last canvases are yet to be stretched. “Campbell painted unstretched,” he says, “so you’ve got this bit that’s not quite square.” The gallery has the onerous task of working out how to crop the pictures without leaving bare canvas visible. Normally one or two edges would be left bare, Mackechnie explains, and Campbell “would come in and just put a wee bit of colour on there”.

It’s heart-breaking to think that these are the last new works we will ever see from Steven Campbell. His body of work, once an infinite jigsaw, is now finite. Generations of fans will relish the challenge of fitting the pieces together, and enjoy the perverse pleasure of never quite succeeding. Campbell, I’m convinced, will have the last laugh.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.08.08