Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews new shows from the painters Lisa Miiroy and Ross Bleckner
Despite the crash of '87 it i seems to be business as usual in the London galleries, at least on Cork Street. Lisa Milroy is a young painter whose latest show, at Nicola Jacobs Gallery, sold out before it opened to the public. Maybe it's not that surprising, since Milroy's art is conspicuously consumable, with its candy-bright colours, its adept, mouthwatering licks of paint and accessi-ble subject matter.
A Lisa Milroy painting is an odd, com-pelling presence, a fetish made concrete. In the past she has painted, inter alia, fur coats, glossy black shoes, shirts, knickers and sunglasses, generally arranged in tight grid-formation on a featureless white ground. Visiting a Milroy exhi¬bition was a peculiar, disorientating ex¬perience, like walking through the pages of a clothes catalogue; this was art with a brochure-like allure, giving you the soft sell.
But for all its apparent accent on face value, matter-of-fact presentation of con-sumer commodities Milroy's work has maintained its own kind of inscrutability. Her subject matter has widened be-wilderingly, to encompass just about any¬thing from Christmas tree baubles to of¬fice stationery, from massed butterflies to assorted items from an ironmonger's hardware catalogue. Just when you've got her taped as a confirmed shoe fetishist, she develops an inveterate interest in Grecian urns.
A painting's success or failure depends on the artist's ability to find an appropri¬ate way of presenting an object or species of object, of compiling a list that also manages, somehow, to be eloquent. Milroy specialises in taking banalities and making you reconsider them, and your relation to them. The most calculatedly ordinary painting in this show is the tersely titled Pulleys, Handles, Castors, Locks and Hinges, which consists, simply, of 35 such items ranged across her usual...
