Mark Currah, ‘Michael Stubbs at Lotta Hammer Gallery’, London, UK, Time Out, July 24-31, 1996

Michael Stubbs was first noticed a few years ago with paintings that looked like gateaux; the sponge mixture was replaced by small square canvases stacked in front of each other and the cream by lashings of oil paint applied through a patissier’s decorative nozzle.  Mocking those who love to slap the oil paint on thick, these works were good for a laugh but they didn’t have enough mileage.  This new work takes a far more serious approach.  Stubbs pours onto panels, in a simple grid pattern, copious amounts of household gloss and eggshell, then stands back as the paint spread out into large, syrupy pools.  As the rigidity of the grid is lost, rhythmic patterns appear and sometimes like Rorschach blots, suggest figuration.  This is Jackson Pollock in slow-motion; auto-pilot abstraction.

The paint is creamy and appetizing.  Stubbs is now one of those painters he so assiduously parodied (perhaps he always was), and there is no longer a snappy punch-line.  The colour, which is taken straight from the tin and has the murky blandness typical of household tints, doesn’t seem to be what the work is about.  More interesting are the differing ways that matt and gloss finishes behave and the relief topography that is built up by repeated pourings.  Then there’s the aspiration for the perfect surface that is implied by the virginal pools of paint - an aspiration forever thwarted by a speck of grime or lump in the paint.  But if paintings were made by robots in laboratory conditions, nobody would look at them.  It’s the fly in the ointment that keeps us using it.