The Reykjavik Grapevine

A Moment's Pause: Callum Innes Creates a Space in Time

9 June 2016

Callum Innes sits in the lounge area of the i8 gallery, looking at a flyer while he thinks. He picks up a pen, and unconsciously presses it to the card, about a third of the way in from the left edge. He moves the pen to the centre, and tilts his head slightly, regarding the flyer, now split in two by his line. He shifts the pen to the right edge, then shifts in his seat uncomfortably.

“Therapeutic?” he says, in a softly -spoken, Scottish-accented voice. “I wouldn’t say painting is therapeutic, no.”

[…]

- John Rogers

Artlyst

Callum Innes: Frith Street Gallery – Taught Restraint And Sensuous Abandon

15 March 2015

The Callum Innes exhibition at Frith Street Gallery repays a little time and attention. On entering the gallery’s darkened premises on Golden Square a small collection of paintings, all at first glance alike, greets you. Walk straight out again and you’d miss the event, for these paintings are exactly that. These are pictures with presence. Their pull is such that simply being in their company is exhilarating, and the whole space is palpably animated by them. The faux industrial interior of the gallery, willfully austere in general, is lent a warm buzz by their addition.

Guardian Guide

Callum Innes, Manchester

2 March 2013

Painterly painters used to talk of any painting worthy of its name being "about paint". Well, Callum Innes puts on the oil paint and scrapes it off, then he puts it on again and washes it off with turps. His works have been referred to as "un-paintings", and a recent series was titled Exposed Paintings. Yet these works tend to be graceful presences. One square of colour sits next to another, their edges bleed out sensuously and their subtle differences of tone take on a lyrical resonance. Yes, these are indeed paintings about paint, and Innes is a painter for whom the phrase is still fitting. 

- Robert Clark

ArtReview

Callum Innes: Unforeseen, Kerlin Gallery

December 2012

It's an enduring problem: how certain pictorial resources, or the imaging capacities of paint, come up against certain material conditions of painting. The title of Callum Innes's show at the Kerlin, Unforeseen, acknowledges the contingencies variously engaged in addressing this issue. And it remains something of a puzzle how these surfaces end up as they are – fluid yet taut, silken or unctuous, full of mineral incident and sparks of contingency – and not otherwise. The paintings only give up so much about the history of their making. In response to a problem, then, less a solution than an intrigue.

[…]

- Tim Stott

Wall Street Journal

The Unpainter

22 March 2012

Callum Innes is best known for what critics dub “unpainting,” and he has collaborated on exhibits with such non-painters as novelist Colm Tóibin. But for an abstract, boundary-crossing artist, his reflections on art can sound almost traditional.

“I like the idea of beauty,” he says. “I see nothing wrong with the beautiful, for things to have a rightness about them.”

His first solo exhibition in Asia, at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong, recently opened. The 1995 Turner Prize finalist shared his thoughts on seeing sound and the biggest problem with art.

[…]

Art in America

Callum Innes at Sean Kelly, New York

6 April 2010

NEW YORK Painting—unlike, say, sculpting—can reliably be called an additive process. And abstract paintings composed of paired monochrome fields don’t generally invite the kind of reading we associate with text. These are two assumptions trounced in the new work of Callum Innes, a Scottish painter with a 20-year commitment to deceptively reductive abstraction. Split not-quite-squares, the paintings on canvas (all 2009) in “At One Remove” were each produced by applying sizing (rabbit-skin glue) to canvas, then several layers of gesso, then two adjacent rectangles of solid-color paint, one of which is thoroughly wiped off with turpentine; then two more rectangles of color are applied, and the other side is wiped. Each belabored but resolutely serene final image is divided vertically by a dark line, a residue of the four applications of paint; some evidence of the process can also be found on the edges of the canvas where it wraps around aluminum stretchers.

- Nancy Princenthal

Artforum

Callum Innes, Ingleby Gallery

5 August 2009

For “I Look to You,” an exhibition by the Scottish painter Callum Innes at Ingleby Gallery, the artist introduces a new series of abstract works. Innes has gently refined his characteristic process of addition and subtraction––applying paint and then removing it with washes of turpentine––by building layers that exude elegance. Most of the works are divided vertically into two equal parts, with one muted side and one dark or bright side painted with a lush hue (blue, red, green, and yellow among them). All exhibit bold horizontal brushstrokes and variegated surfaces.

It has been said that Innes’s interest in light is inspired by the Scottish landscape. In these paintings, however, the artist plays with contrast. Light and colored shadows are revealed beneath the surface as if spilling out through cracks along the centerline or around the edges of the canvas itself. All untitled, these are meditative pieces. Inviting the mind neither to cling to a particular theme nor to wander, they draw awareness to the rigorous procedure of their creation, balancing the tension between staying in the moment and allowing the process to unfold.

- Lauren Dyer Amazeen

The Observer

Ommm. Hear the paintings hum

11 March 2007

Sit in front of one of Innes's Exposed Paintings and you feel meditative to the point of not quite being able to struggle to your feet. It occurs to you that you might easily stay put all day, thinking your own dark thoughts and, possibly, taking the odd nap. His work, like that of Rothko and Newman, seems almost to emit a bat-like hum, so subtle is it in its construction, so strangely intense in its effect

- Rachel Cooke

frieze

Callum Innes, Kunsthalle

5 May 1999

Frieze

In the five exhibition rooms, an almost pretentious quiet prevails, emanating from the tonal shifts within expansive, monochromatic colour fields ruptured by delicate liquid flows. The visual and spatial unity of Callum Innes' exhibition is dependent upon a conceptually motivated painterly process: the application of monochromatic colour zones within a rigid geometry. Colour is stripped back or washed off with turpentine until the underpainting glimmers through or runs out. Trickles of seeping paint remain visible on the paintings as cloudy stained surfaces, dark edges and isolated rivulets.

- Hans Rudolf Reust
 

frieze

Callum Innes

20 August 1991

[…]

Why do you want to distance yourself from the work?

Six or seven years ago my work was figurative. I felt that the paintings had so much of myself in them that it was absolutely clear what l was feeling when l made them. I wanted to keep that distance so I could look at the paintings on a reflective plane, and other people could also. For a while there was a need for a lot of artists to keep a distance from their work, but actually I enjoy it when people do realise that there's some of you in it, and that it's not just a process painting. Because then it is just a process painting to me. In my work there is also something emotional, perhaps slightly spiritual going on in the canvases, especially the white ones. I just didn't want them to be completely self-evident.

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