Hyperallergic

Paintings We Need

6 November 2016

In an era that celebrates celebrity, vulgar loudmouths, puerile provocateurs, selfie-addicts, and excessive materialists, Merlin James prefers subtlety over din, less rather than more.

The paintings have not gotten bigger. The artist continues to paint landscapes, interiors, and other genre scenes. Some of the paintings have a hole (or what the artist calls a “negative collage”) in them. There are paintings done on damaged-looking nylon fabric, which reminds me of a used dishcloth or package wrapping. There are also a number of “frame paintings,” in which the artist has used a found frame to make a shallow box exposing the work’s stretcher bars. A transparent sheet of silk or nylon has been stretched over the bars to create a scrim on which a few daubs of paint might be added. Those daubs can become a house, or a tree, or a row of factory buildings.

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- John Yau

Artforum Critics' Picks

Merlin James, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow

February 2016

Merlin James sometimes refers to his activity as “easel painting,” and it makes sense, considering the intimate scale and historic subject matter he usually works with. This survey, which covers over three decades of production and contains thirty-one paintings, twenty-one drawings, and fifty-four sculptures, mostly of model buildings displayed in vitrines, offers a succinct view of the Welshman’s projects. It is rare that these tiny sculptures, normally found within his paintings and constructed from leftover wood fragments, get exhibited.

James’s paintings are predominately landscapes in format and evocation. They depict a wide range of things: buildings, birds, artists, sex, the past, and even a luggage carousel. He references Poussin, Courbet, and, most obviously, Auguste Herbin, in a work titled Herbin (left panel), 1998–2008. Its geometric composition is signed with the French painter’s name instead of James’s, though interestingly, in James’s cursive hand, “Herbin” looks a lot like “Merlin.”

The corpus on view is ill at ease and hardly easy. James’s work has sought to rigorously problematize the experience of painting while simultaneously deepening its formal language. In the elegant Hanger, 2016, the object’s darkly lacquered stretcher bars can be seen through its mesh surface. They suggest a tree, while a long cross bar indicates a horizon line. James’s antagonistic use of holes, sticks, hair, fabric, and thick swatches of paint seem to make what he does, more than anything else, deeply poetic.

- Sherman Sam

Frieze Critic's Guide

Serge Charchoune / Merlin James, Douglas Hyde Gallery

14 February 2016

In Gallery 2 at Douglas Hyde, Merlin James’s deft suggestions in paint and wood are the artist’s accompaniment to the exhibition of neglected Franco Russian artist Serge Charchoune (1888–1975), whom he also curated in the main space. Charchoune’s work is interesting, but it is James’ three barely-there paintings (all 2015) that hold the mind. Gestures in paint, on fabric that reveals the supporting structures of the picture frame, conjure up buildings, clouds, trees. The artist’s genius way with shadows add a three-dimensionality alongside an unstable, fairytale-feel. Below two of these are long low vitrines, in which James has created whole villages of buildings from studio debris: off-cuts of stretcher bar and frame moulding. The little installation is a gem of a piece, the essence of art’s ability to create whole worlds from just a small set of gestures.

- Gemma Tipton

The New York Times

Merlin James, Genre Paintings, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

26 February 2015

"One of the quietly great painters of our moment, Merlin James works in ways both predictable and surprising. He has established his own lexicon of terms, which includes modestly sized canvases, atmospheric landscapes populated with partial figures and coy maneuvers into the picture’s shape and surface … "

- Martha Schwendener

artnet news: Top 10 New York Gallery Shows

Merlin James, Genre Paintings, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

25 February 2015

No two paintings by Merlin James look alike, and that is a large part of their strength and appeal. In this densely packed show, “Genre Paintings," the Welsh-born artist cavalierly explores a wide range of abstract and figurative motifs, seemingly unconcerned with establishing any sort of formulaic continuity. His only concession to a format seems to be in terms of scale, which remains relatively modest, as his works never extend over a couple of feet in either dimension.

Bridge (2014), is a relatively detailed painting of a suspension bridge seen from a treeless hillside above the muddy river bank. The work's richly textured surface conveys a palpable sense of the materials—earth and metal—highlighted in the image. In a number of works James uses a surface with concave sides, suggesting a topological twist on painting's conventional rectangular format. Outstanding among these is an untitled work (2010–2015) that shows the backs of three human heads facing an infinite sky painted a delicate shade of pale mauve. Bands of yellow and ochre secure the right and left sides of the composition. This work and numerous others in the show demonstrate James's technical prowess—the consummate brushwork and extraordinary color sense—not to mention the seemingly inexhaustible range of imagery, that makes his work unique.

- David Ebony

Hyperallergic

What does it mean to be a grown-up painter?

22 February 2015

"… James doesn’t fall into the familiar art market camps being heavily promoted by curators and critics alike these days. He isn’t into copying, pastiche, faux improvisation, contempt, kitsch, irony, abstract lyricism, didacticism or literalism. There are no allusions to Abstract Expressionism in his work, no parodies of the gestural. He doesn’t pull back the canvas to simply show you that there is a stretcher behind it, which is to say he doesn’t come across as a teacher who underestimates the intelligence of his audience. James’ paintings are not platforms where gestures of contempt are deposited as some kind of meaningful residue. Such familiar negations strike me as proverbial outbursts of testosterone-fueled male adolescence. To his credit, James doesn’t want to be the latest manifestation of a male adolescent painter, a clichéd archetype that gained traction in the Neo-Expressionist ‘80s, with the rise of Julian Schnabel, and has not been thrown over because lots of people still find this sort of chest thumping entertaining. He is the only artist that can introduce whimsy into a work without devolving into the whimsical …"

- John Yau

Time Out New York

Merlin James, Genre Paintings, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

12 February 2015

Despite the obituaries written for the medium since the 19th century, people like paintings, and painters like to make them. Which might explain the recent countervailing argument, which stipulates that contemporary artists must somehow allow that painting used to be dead, even if it never really was. This sort of nonsense informs shows like MoMA’s contemporary painting survey, “The Forever Now.”

Nevertheless, Welsh painter Merlin James would have been my pick for that show, though, admittedly, there’s a lot of art-world aficionados with left-out artist lists of their own. His latest show fields modestly scaled compositions packing the punch of grand ambitions. Each is a cocktail of figure, landscape, still life and abstraction, spiked with a measure of melancholy or wistful remembrance. James also takes a reflexive look at the glass: Some of the canvases are shaped, and some are made of stretched transparent mesh, revealing occasionally painted wooden supports. Other works edge their subjects with bands of color or sport tiny architectural models.

James explores painting’s plasticity not only as smeared pigment but also as an art-historical tradition that’s kneaded, pulled apart and mushed back into formats familiar and not. He makes this point almost literally with a number of works whose sides are bowed as if they’d been squeezed by a giant hand.

The brushwork varies from thick (the faint cerulean background behind the titular Single Flower) to soaked in (the foregrounded landscape in Bridge) to dragged or dappled. The palette can be muted or break out into bright tones (like the sylvan view in Silver Birch). Echoes of Turner, Bacon and Albert Pinkham Ryder abound.

Pure abstractions are included here, but mostly James is an imagist wandering the terrain of memory. At issue, however, is not just the individual’s anamnesis, but painting’s itself—a discipline that’s always looked backward to move ahead.

- Howard Halle

ArtReview

Merlin James, Freestyle, Kunstverein Freiburg

April 2014

"Merlin James's motifs emerge as though unbidden out of a painterly process too shy or too proud to elicit them. Content is not a glimpse, as in de Kooning's famous phrase, it is a clear-cut image, but one that the painter registers as though by default, with his eye on other things: on painting as material accretion (as distinct from the temporal singularity of the still image); as an open-ended process, not intent on closure. These motifs have the explicitness of signs for content – the three dimensions of a house, the stacked landscape zones of field/treeline/sky – as though the Welsh painter were demonstrating how susceptible we are to illusionism. But irony is counterbalanced by sentiment, or apparently so, as yearning often proves to be a received image of itself; received, that is, from the reservoir of art-historical precedent that James taps into …"

- Mark Prince

Abstract Critical

Merlin James, Parasol Unit

26 June 2013

"In a world of spectacular logic there’s something refreshing about a painter who refuses to pin down his subjects. Letting the motifs of his work emerge, as if by magic, from the formal matrix of his paintings, Merlin James risks whimsicality but instead finds something new in the easily forgotten. Like a burnished coin found in the crevice of a pocket James’s paintings have an almost uncanny familiarity, as though we are rediscovering something previously kept hidden. His boats, his trees, his chugging trains and lolling bridges are fleetingly familiar, like memories, landmarks on a journey through an intricate mental landscape …"

- Dan Coombs

Artforum

Merlin James, Galerie les Filles du Calvaire

April 2013

"Spanning more than fifteen years, the twenty-one works collected in Merlin James's exhibition "Painting" epitomize his signature blend of dizzingly diverse subjects, styles, and techniques. From a faux-naive still life with bird rendereed in thick eath tones, Male Bird (Pecking), 2008–11, to a minimalist study in turquoise just barely suggesting architecture (Building, 2008); from Untitled, 2009, a gritty close-up of a sex act, to Burn and Grotto, ca. 2000–2009, an abstract diptych that has been burned, punctured, and collaged, James – an art critic as well as a painter – is consistent only in his determination to eschew genre, comparison and easy description …"

- Mara Hoberman

Art in America

Museums in Flux

05 February 2013

MUSEUMS IN GLASGOW, as in other cities, are often battlegrounds for ideological conflict, as well as barometers of economic and political pressure. When I first visited here some 15 years ago, maverick museum director Julian Spald- ing was causing a furor with his recently founded Gallery of Modern Art, where he tried to counter prevalent insti- tutionalized avant-gardism with what many found a clunky populism. He left in 1999, but since then controversies around Glasgow museums have continued.

- Merlin James

Artforum, Best of 2011

Merlin James, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

December 2011

Like his near contemporaries Peter Diog and Luc Tuymans, James takes painting's multiple and overlapping histories partly as his subject matter and partly as a point of departure. The paintings are stylistically promiscuous – it is hard to describe or even imagine a "typical James." Yet seen together they not only make perfect sense but alos articulate something of the infinite freedom and the stubborn vitality of the medium.

- Matthew Higgs

Frieze

Merlin James, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

1 November 2011

Evening Sun; Night; Big Landscape Painting; Windmill (Blue Sails) (all  2010–11). As their titles make plain, Merlin James’s recent works were fashioned with landscape in mind. Their topography is filtered, however, through a baffle of layers, both material and metaphysical. Each of these relatively small works is stubbornly, mischievouslu paradoxical in its encasement. A fram presents its contents frontally. Yet they form, in fact, the back of anorher undressed canvas. Stretched over this exposed support, in turn, is a transparent scrim, which occasionally opens onto miniature wooden houses perched on a transverse slat; or a beaded necklace strung behing (in front of) the flimsy, see-through pane. In nearly every instance, paint appears smeared over the gossamer surface, only occasionally congealing into a house or a tree …" 

- Ara H. Merjian

Artforum

Merlin James, Sikkema Jenkins & Co

November 2011

"… James's most recent show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. – a presentation of more than twenty paintings made between 1989 and 2011 – argued forcefully that experimentation has consistently rested at the heart of his project. Arranged in no particular order, the works trace his involvement with a wide range of historical flotsam – from seascapes to abstractions – and pictorial effects: Surfaces are painted thick or thin, abraded, festooned with sawdust or matted hair, and sometimes cut to achieve "negative collage" (holes in the canvas that expose the walls behind them) …"

- Suzanne Hudson