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| David Spiller |
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Readers of Ian Rankin's series of novels about crime in Edinburgh will be familiar with the thought processes of Inspector John Rebus. When a case gets going, and especially towards the dénouement, the detective's mind is haunted by scraps of old rock music. A fragment of lyric from a '70s album by the Stones, for example, may give him the vital clues to who did it, how and why. In the sphere of painting, David Spiller has that trait - though only that - in common with the hard-boiled Rebus. As a painting begins to reach its conclusion, his mind fills with snatches of song: odd phrases, or a few lines from innumerable diverse sources, some of them hard to locate even for him. 'I think that's from a number Dean Martin used to sing' he might say while explaining the picture, or 'take care' which is what he's just said to someone going out for a walk. If these bibs and bobs from the vast sea of popular culture that each of us carries around inside our heads seem to fit the theme of his painting, then he confides them to the canvas. That is, he writes the words on, in letters so small that they more or less defy photography. So that his painting is transformed into something roughly resembling a poster on the tube much annotated by the public with biros and felt tipped pens, or a heavily graffitied wall. 'It is' he says, 'As though I make my own wall, and it's one you can carry about and hang in your sitting room'. He has this in common with the young Cy Twombly, another painter who made pictures that resembled walls - in his case, ancient sections of crumbling plaster from some Mediterranean city, covered with an obscene and primordial muttering. But, in Spiller's case the words - tiny and sometimes almost illegible - are only the last part of a complex process. Indeed, Spiller's work could be seen as a highly original conflation of half the trends in art of the last fifty years. The scribbled words - and also the more occasional figures - would correspond to Twombly, and the art brut of Jean Dubuffet - the French painter who drew attention to the art of children, the insane and the urban vandal. (Dubuffet's work must have been a fascinating antidote for the youthful Spiller, to the curriculum at the Slade, circa 1960, where he was taught to draw like Ingres, and won the Henry Tonks prize for draughtsmanship). But a Spiller painting starts out in a very different manner, in a way we might associate with the formal abstraction championed by Clement Greenberg. Over this basis goes the principle motif of the painting - the part which is not invisible to photography at all, the bit that corresponds to the poster that is scribbled over. This might be the CND peace symbol, or Mickey Mouse, or Thomson and Thompson, the identical bowler-hatted detectives from Tin Tin.
Directors:Reg Singh & Patricia Singh Associate Directors: Lucy Liversedge & Sarah-Manning Cordwell Spiller has recycled all manner of graphic things - including Picasso's Dove, and a Van Gogh Haystack - but the result is always bold and flat in the manner we associate with the targets and flags of Jasper Johns, and the soup cans and Marilyn Monroes of Andy Warhol. As a matter of fact, in a recent painting - 'just for fun' - Spiller has actually painted a trademark Warhol Campbell's soup tin. And at the bottom, also big and bold like the caption of a cartoon, goes the main message. The American artist Ed Ruscha - another notable user of words in art - has spoken of the way that he feels his paintings need to be 'confounded'. And Spiller's manner of approaching a painting could be seen as one layer of confounding after another. The words beneath the image may straight-forwardly tie-in with the message. 'Peace' under the CND logo, 'Did I tell you lately how much I love you?' under a painting made of the four big letters L,O,V,E. But the relationship can be much more enigmatic. Beneath four squares of combat camouflage such as you might find on a soldier's jacket, is the instruction, 'Close your eyes and I'll kiss you'. And the confounding continues in the next phase when above the bold, universally recognisable symbol or image, appear a set of bouncing, abstract, coloured dots. Those add an extra layer of irony to the Warhol soup can picture - inscribed with David Bowie's strange prediction, 'There's a starman waiting in the sky'. To one side, are a couple of ranks of polka dots - a sight that will suggest the name Damien Hirst to any art literate person these days. But these are Spiller dots, the cheery little soap bubbles of colour that he has been using since the '60s Spiller was onto the dot long before Damien Hirst. And the use he puts them to is abstract - to complicate, and balance the design. Over the dots may go yet more balancing and qualifying in the form of freely shaped flecks of paint, or sometimes a network of scribbled lines. As I have described it, Spiller's work might sound rather coldly art historical: a mixture of pop, art brut, colour field abstraction, and this and that. Indeed, you could say that making all those elements coexist within a single image is rather cleverly post-modern. But I'm sure it doesn't feel like that to the artist. The paintings are done, as he puts it 'with a good heart', and are full of feeling. He paints the peace symbol, and the dove, because - after all peace really would be a good thing to achieve. The songs and verbal objets trouvées that he seems to whisper to the surfaces of the canvas are also saturated with private emotion and reference (so much so that you would have to be him to follow them all). The final result is a highly personal mixture of the private and the public, the visually sophisticated and the popular, the intimate and the universal - personal memories and Mickey Mouse. It's all brought together - as art should be - because it seems to fit. Rebus, one of those detectives who works by intuition rather than logical deduction, would understand that. Martin Gayford, June 2002
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Selected Bibliography 1942 Born in
Dartford Kent 1987 Zeitkunst
Gallery, Innsbruck and Cologne (solo show) 1989 Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show) 1990 Alexander
Roussos Gallery, London 1991 Ariadne
Gallery, Vienna (solo show) 1992 Reflex Gallery,
Vienna (solo show) 1993 Gallery
Naviglio, Milan and Venice, Italy 1994 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show) 1995 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark 1997 Gallery
Cotthem, Barcelona, Spain (solo show) 2000 Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show); Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida; Beaux Arts, London 2002 Beaux Arts, London Art Fairs Recent reviews All works are acrylic and crayon on canvas |
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