cleworth

Robert Cleworth Three different types of abstraction Legge Gallery, 20 August - 7 September
Del Kathryn Barton Drawings and Objects Ray Hughes Gallery, 30 August - 25 September

In an address to students at the National Art School in 2000, Luc Tuymans suggested that the proliferation of images of sex - in popular culture and pornography as well as art - has rendered it an almost impossible subject for the painter. Tuymans, a painter who has been keenly attuned to the effects of photography on the way we see, told of his repeated efforts to depict sex, and of how the human figure became gradually less visible, eventually disappearing from his painting altogether and leaving an image of a motel room, its bed in disarray. Like many artists, Tuymans found inference and suggestion more powerful - or perhaps simply more viable - than the type of outright exposition that has become so common in our culture.

However, the expansion in sexual imagery made available by the camera has been received by some painters as a liberation. Robert Cleworth has worked with explicit sexual imagery consistently over the last ten years. He is above all a painter, but one who uses drawing, photography and digital imaging, sometimes in combination with oil paint. His paintings' origins in pornographic material are unmistakable, but Cleworth brings a painterly sensitivity - an astonishing richness of surface - to his images. The results can be intriguing. On entering his recent exhibition Three different types of abstraction one was met by a small but extremely confronting painting of a penis entering a vagina, with no detail spared. While for many viewers such a graphic image would be difficult to look at - it certainly was for me - the material qualities of Cleworth's painting and its fine-grained illusionism are absorbing. Compulsion and repulsion were thus simultaneous. While wanting to look away, I was drawn to peer more closely to understand how this painting had been made.

It is this knife-edge of uncertainty on the part of the viewer that Cleworth aims for. His work does not depict his particular experience of sex, or present a coherent view of the place of sex in human experience. Rather, it confronts the viewer with the bare, physical facts of sex and aims to allow for whatever response results.

Cleworth's usual strategy is to set pornographic imagery next to other, less provocative elements: landscapes and non-representational forms. Untitled Satellite Fragments is such a work. This painting's dominant forms are non-representational: swathes of grey and splashes of liquid blue rolling across the white canvas. It is only on looking into this field of colour that one finds a finely painted penis, erect and seeming to emerge from a dark slit of shadow. Adjacent to this, the name 'Chloe' is painted in tidy lettering. Without a narrative context or coherent figurative space in which to account for these elements, the viewer is left to make sense of the fragments for themselves: to respond, once again, as they will.

But is it possible to respond conclusively to paintings in which such provocative imagery is left unhinged? Cleworth avoids creating self-explanatory relationships between forms because he wants his paintings' content to remain open-ended - to be resolved only when the viewer brings their values and experiences to bear upon the painting. His repeated use of the words 'untitled fragments' in titles confirms this beyond doubt. But the non-specific and fragmentary nature of these compositions precludes the possibility of response. The artist weaves his fragmentary elements into a composition that is visually satisfying, but their conceptual sparking-off against each other is not strong enough to allow for a substantial interpretation. The viewer is thus left with two unsatisfying conclusions: to respond to the images for their shock value or as marvels of oil painting technique. Cleworth's ambitions are clearly much higher than that, and given the highly contentious nature of the concerns he has taken on, it may be that for other viewers his work realises those aims. I, however, found it difficult to meet the artist halfway when he remained so coolly absent from his work.

Del Kathryn Barton is situated at the other end of the temperature scale. Her drawings, recently exhibited with assorted sculptural objects at Ray Hughes Gallery, depict a cast of characters - both human and animal - in sexual narratives that draw on everyday situations, but exaggerate them to the level of the bizarre. In one very large drawing a woman lies spread-eagled on a tearoom floor, exhorting a dog to "take me to your leader". The dog's tail curls into her underpants and out again, while on the floor beside them a pair of milk cartons seem poised for whatever type of congress inanimate objects engage in. While this work set the tone for most of the large-scale drawings in the exhibition, many of the smaller drawings did not carry worded narratives, functioning more as straightforward erotica.

Elements of Barton's work are irredeemably silly. Most conspicuously her trite titles ("May your spirit rest in peace, and the fact that I adore you is but one of my truths") and the way she draws the human head. While accepting that her figures are not intended to be actual, credible personages, I nevertheless found it difficult to take them seriously as artistic propositions. Endowed with impossibly large and lengthened eyes, glam-rock make-up and hairstyles that incorporate shaving, crimping and dreadlocking all at once, they look like scaled-up versions of a talented adolescent's exercise book jottings. Psychologically and emotionally stunted, Barton's figures come across as little more than mannequins, which is a problem in works that seek to draw the viewer into an empathetic relationship with the characters they depict.

But if the fantasy world in which Barton locates her figures frequently descends into the ridiculous, it enables her a creative latitude that in some respects she uses well. The persistent placement of animals alongside sexualised human beings could be mistaken as the manifestation of a strange urge on the artist's part. Rather, it evinces a deep and significant human identification with the animal realm. Animals are the real life forces in Barton's work. She draws them as vital presences, possessed of a dignity that rarely comes through in her human figures. While the eyes of Barton's cats and dogs are afflicted by a similar stylisation to their human counterparts, somehow they radiate intelligence and alertness. I found the series of small drawings of cats, entitled Pussy Love, some of the strongest works in the exhibition. Drawn with a vigorous line and beautifully augmented with tone and colour, these felines regard the viewer with ravenous, almost frightening curiosity. There is no overt sexual content to these drawings, but their mystery and allure is greater as a result.

The other strength of this exhibition, which suggests that Barton is capable of substantial things, were the strange and inventive hybrid forms that appear in some of the drawings. In "May your spirit rest in peace..." a tesselating web, structurally reminiscent of snakeskin and tyre treads and with its culminating point in a row of Barton's hexagonal eye-shapes, winds its way down the left hand side of the image. Pointing equally to natural and manufactured sources, this highly expressive form underlines Barton's attentiveness to the visual echoes running through different realms of experience. It shows the artist moving to an intuitive abstractness that complements the figurative elements of her work.

-Ernest Foster