Andrew Graham-Dixon on new work by Steven Campbell, Scotland's most successful young painter
IN 1515 Albrecht Durer made an engraving of what he thought a rhinoceros might look like — an armoured beast with ass's ears, a hairy snout and a comically diminutive second horn protruding from its neck. Three centuries later George Stubbs saw a real rhinoceros and painted it standing against a romantic background of louring clouds, like a steel-clad thoroughbred resting from its exertions in the rhinos' equivalent of the Derby.
Steven Campbell, easily the most successful member of the new generation of Scottish painters, has come up with the latest and most mischievous addition to art history's stock of rhinoceroses. His By Order No Rhinos hangs in the exhibition that marks the prodigal Scot's return from a triumphant five years in New York. A long-nosed man kitted out in boxing gear — hindered by a figure leaning out of an apple tree who grabs him by the ears — is pursued across a field by an impish, frisky rhino. Campbell's ungainly hero treads on a broom in his attempts to escape, Bertie Wooster fashion, causing it to strike him the face.
Like most of the paintings in Campbell's new show, By Order No Rhinos is an opaque, somewhat clumsily painted exercise in surrealism. It is, however, possible to salvage some kind of meaning — however banal — from the artist's calculatedly zany clutter. If Stubbs and Durer treated the rhinoceros like a side-show curiosity, Campbell, in his oddball way, reasserts the rights of rhinos.
In the middle of the painting, the two halves of a broken sign read "By order no!" and "rhinos". Campbell's beast pursues its prey with blithe indifference to the rules set down by human beings — as usual in his work,...
