Gary Hume may have started out by painting doors, but he now loves the unforeseen directions that painting can take him. He remains the leading painter to have emerged from the Young British Artists, writes Aidan Dunne,Art Critic.
Gary Hume established his reputation with paintings of doors - ordinary hospital swing doors, painted with ordinary gloss paint. They reproduced the details and dimensions of actual doors, they looked like doors, they felt like doors, they might as well have been doors. Both objects and images, blank impediments and points of access, as paintings they are cleverly ambiguous, non-committal in terms of meaning but substantial enough to carry a burden of symbolism. Their institutional origins in hospital might make them portals between life and death, for example, or they could function as allegories of painting, offering a way in, implying a world beyond, but yet all on the surface.
All of which is fairly typical of Hume's work in the longer term. He still paints doors on occasion. His current exhibition at IMMA, a survey of his work over the last 10 years or so, features a pair, vivid pink, with portholes as eyes, and embellished with the upturned arc of a smiling mouth in the manner of a child's drawing. But that's the only door painting in the show.
In the early 1990s, he made a decisive shift and admitted a brave new world of subject matter. If the doors were a smart way of redoing conceptualism or minimalism, his subsequent paintings revisit Pop Art, albeit at a sceptical distance.
Although his paintings are predominantly representational, as images they are often extremely elliptical. Typically he takes an image - of a blackbird, the face of a pop culture icon, a nude, a flower, an animal, a pool of water - and whittles it down to just a few lines. These linear templates demarcate areas of flat colour that need have no naturalistic relationship to the subject.
The paintings, with their expanses of bold gloss and striking colour combinations, can be very luscious, with a commanding formal presence that plays against the apparent triviality or even the kitsch nature of their ostensible subjects. You approach something that appears fairly abstract and austere, and suddenly realise you're looking at Kate Moss's face in close-up, or maybe Patsy Kensit, or a puppy. No wonder we can be momentarily uncertain about where to place them in the cultural hierarchy, but Hume isn't going to make it any easier for us. He is famously terse about his work and what it means or doesn't mean.
Clearly, though, he likes the contradictions inherent in his paintings. Unlike Jeff Koons, who glories in the sheer tackiness of naff popular culture, Hume wants to make paintings that are beautiful in more complex and demanding ways.
One of his first figurative paintings - with a religious subject matter - was called, tellingly, This is not Possible. He was clearly challenging himself in trying to incorporate and reconcile radically divergent elements. He doesn't totally shy away from meaning in terms of interpretative possibilities, but says: "It's not polemical work, I've nothing to say in that sense. I think what I really want is to make paintings that are generous and beautiful and . . . that make you feel, really."
He was among the artists who exhibited in Damien Hirst's landmark Freeze exhibition in 1988, the year he graduated from Goldsmiths College in London, and he went on to become one of the central figures of the YBAs - the Young British Artists. In fact, he remains the leading painter to have emerged from that group, with an estimable reputation and a formidable track record, something of a feat given that painting per se was not regarded as cool within the Brit Art world in the 1990s.
But Hume feels he had no choice in the matter. "I've always been a painter. I mean, I love painting, but I couldn't be anything else anyway. I couldn't really do anything else. I made one video, and I made one sculpture. But when I say I made it, it was actually made already. I found it. It was perfect, I didn't add anything to it. So unless I find another perfect thing, I won't be able to make another sculpture."
His one sculpture is based on a snowman, and he has used this single form in many permutations. There are two at IMMA, a gold-coloured one and an enormous white version.
As with the sculpture, in a sense he finds his paintings. "I've got lots of books, picture books. Wherever I go, I'll buy them, and I take photographs. So I look through these images and suddenly I'll see one of my paintings. It's that definite. It's not so much to do with the image, it's something to do with a detail of the composition, and a certain positive-negative quality, and a simple silhouette effect. So it's not even that I see something that I can use, it's more than that. I can see my work in it to begin with."
The ground-plan of a painting will be worked out before any paint is applied. "You can struggle with a painting for ages and you just can't get anywhere and then you realise the problem was there on day one. Having said that, it can be great to fight a painting for a long time, just as it's great to do one in three days without any sweat at all, just pure pleasure."
Although he tends to use colour directly now, for a long time he built up layers of white on white and, during this process "the painting slowly informed me what colour it wanted to be. I could say, that's going to be red and yellow and after a while the painting says: 'you're crazy, I've no interest in red and yellow, I want to be two kinds of green'."
While there are references to pop art in the incorporation of populist elements, his paintings are too quirkily themselves to suggest the mass-production ethic of Andy Warhol or, again, Koons, with their production line workshops.
"No, I just couldn't do that. The nearest I came to it was when I was getting ready for Venice [where he represented Britain at the Biennale in 1996\]. I had six people working for me then. It was a nightmare. You're a boss. You become removed from what you're doing. I mean, you set out the criteria, but if you've not made it, you're in the same position as anyone else looking at it. I'd be in the position of standing there saying: Can anyone tell me about this?"
Similarly, although he returns again and again to particular subjects, he finds that he can't work in series. "I keep trying because at least that would show I have a coherent visual intelligence. I'll paint a woman's face and say, well I could do seven of those and I'll have a series. So, I'll start the next one and suddenly I find I've scraped the image away and there goes the series."
Although he began to use gloss paint on the basis of truth to materials, because he was painting doors and gloss paint is used on doors, he has stayed faithful to it. "What happened was that I could see what a gorgeous paint it is. I'm not the first person to notice that - tons of artists have used enamel paint. Pollock used it. It's not easy, it does an amazing amount of things but it can be quite complicated to use."
Time and again he comes back to the idea of being free to take off in unforeseen directions in a painting. "You construct these rules for yourself, and it takes an effort to realise that there are no fixed rules." The nearest he comes to a rule is his instinctive sense that you edit, you take away things that "tend to add a narrative to a painting that is unimportant". For him, "too much adornment" in a painting is bad. "Really what a painting needs is space to be itself."
Gary Hume, Paintings and Sculpture is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, until June 22nd. Telephone: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie.