Andrew Graham-Dixon on Terry Atkinson
TERRY ATKINSON'S recent paintings are twisted, ugly things that look as if they have been tor-tured into existence. Slimy trans-parent gunge clings to his canvases, where it glistens like mucus or the sticky trails left by slugs. A large roll of fabric bound gummily to one picture manages at once to suggest a grue so me ly amputated and wrapped limb, a soiled blanket and a dressing peeled messily off a wound. Ghostly figures hover in cracked and blistered textures, implying human bodies that have been un-accountably vapourised or burned beyond recognition.
As usual in Atkinson's art, the objects themselves are only half the story: to make sure you get their point he has appended his customary text-length titles. A sinister configuration of painted wood and wire bears the breath-less, enigmatic title "Quartered Tiger Booby Map-Trap with Paintglue Islands and Plastergiue Rocks made in the High Security Modernist Art Class in the Blocks and wired-up to be Sensitive to mute retinal Modernist contact." Turning from painting and text to the book that accompanies the show (Atkinson's art constantly has you scurrying from word to image and back again) you learn that nearly all these paintings are Republican comments on the An-glo-Irish problem.
Once that is clear, Atkinson's mixed media constructions take on dark metaphorical resonances. The electronic wires and aerials attached to the pictures hint at surveillance; the thick blobs of white resin that bind tubes or wires to their surfaces turn them into incendiary devices, booby traps set to blow in the art gallery. Much of Atkinson's work in the past has turned on a single, point-edly sick, joke. In his last series, "Art for the Bunker", it was the ludicrous disjunction between the "happy snap" conventions of holi-day photos and the realities of...
