Innes exposed

The American sculptor Janine Antoni established her reputation with a sly piece of deconstruction. She took the archetypal minimalist cube - a blank, solid block - had it cast in chocolate and began to nibble away at the corners. Since minimalism, her gesture implied, did not address her concerns, she would make it do so. There is some similarity between Antoni's celebrated subversion of High Modernist art and Callum Innes's approach to painting in his sequence of Exposed Paintings, some of which feature in his current IMMA exhibition. These works look as if they set out with the intention of being straightforward minimalist abstracts. Typically, a flat block of colour is painted onto a white canvas. What could be simpler? But then Innes sets about nibbling into the perfection of the painted surface. Actually, he does more than nibble at it. He washes a solvent - turpentine - over a large part of it, dissolving the still-tacky pigment so that it runs off the canvas, leaving a cloudy residue and perhaps a ghostly outline of the original shape. This sounds messy but it is done very precisely. The finished work is a poised combination of something covered and exposed, of addition and subtraction. Looking at the canvas, we are impelled to trace the sequence of making and unmaking.

This means that there is something paradoxical about the paintings. A work that seems, from a slight distance, to be a simple, homogeneous composition - involving, say, black, grey and white - turns out on closer inspection to be the simultaneous manifestation of opposites, of positive and negative. Even the colour becomes more complex. One effect of the process of dissolution is to unpack the constituents of a painting's single colour like the contents of a suitcase. What we might take, at a glance, to be black, breaks down into rich and unexpected hues, revealing the red or yellow oxides that are otherwise invisibly mixed in with greys. This knowledge directs us back to the "black", in which we can then see inflections of colour - in fact, Innes is a very good, subtle colourist.

For a painter of such austere, considered works, he turns out to be a surprisingly young, refreshingly unpretentious artist. He was born in Edinburgh in 1962, and it is a measure of his self-confidence that he continues to live and work there. In a way the logic of making a career in the British art world should have drawn him to London but, though he makes a point of travelling south frequently, he has felt no need to transfer his base. Besides: "Edinburgh is home. I've tried in my head to move away many times but I've never succeeded." Not that he is chauvinistic about the Scottish painting tradition. On the contrary, he is healthily critical. The work he's doing now is, in a sense, a response to or a departure from the dominance of the Scottish colourists. "Edinburgh College of Art suffers slightly from its own history. People study there and go on to teach there, it's a kind of self-reinforcing process". One of the few painters to have been short-listed for the Turner Prize in the 1990s, he's also been nominated for practically everything else going, and last year won the NatWest Art Prize, worth £26,000.

He is notoriously cautious about what he lets out of the studio, and readily admits to having a high rejection rate, understandable given the element of chance that plays a part. "I'll edit quite heavily, at different stages of the process." What this means is that he subjects each work to rigorous surveillance, making sure that everything feels "natural". This is partly to ensure that no minute discrepancies get through. You might overlook a tiny dot of colour in a cursory examination, but if the painting is permanently there on the wall over a period of weeks or months, that dot will become an annoying distraction, something that disrupts the overall effect by becoming a point of interest in itself.

One visitor to the studio, Marco Livingston, observing the high attrition rate, was prompted to devise an ingenious plan for the rejected canvasses. Some of them became covers for a limited edition of Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece, a parable about an artist who works obsessively on painting a masterpiece that turns out to be, apart from one perfectly painted ankle, an incoherent mass of colour. It's a story that has intrigued artists over several generations and it is oddly appropriate that fragments of "failed" paintings should end up as its binding.

Besides the Exposed Paintings, Innes has several other sequences - he prefers "sequences" to "series" - of work, including, in the IMMA show, the Resonances and a group of beautiful watercolours. The Resonances are logical opposites of the Exposed Paintings. Their white surfaces, which inevitably recall Robert Ryman, are gradually built up through the accumulation of myriad applications of tiny individual marks, which are then allowed to drip and slide.

It's entirely possible to see Innes as a dour Scot preaching a spirit of Calvinist denial while his fellow Young British Artists party the night away and pin their faith in shock tactics and the hard sell. And without question, while it would be wrong to see it as a conscious riposte, Innes's work does represent an alternative, radically different strategy. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that, in a brash contemporary environment innately suspicious of painting, it still manages - with its appeal to a slow, contemplative engagement with the artwork on the part of the viewer, its quiet insistence on a considered, one-to-one encounter - to appeal to so many people. But then, one of Innes's major strengths is his knack of prompting us to engage with complex conceptual questions via the simplest of means.

Callum Innes, Paintings and Watercolours, can be seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until September 12th