ZOMBIE FORMALISM was coined by the artist and critic Walther Robinson in 2014: “With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.”

Unlike Robinson, I find “zombie” exciting as a metaphor for art. Yet Robinson’s use of zombie — who is a figurative painter by the way — is for a particular moment, when the economy was rising from the grave, following the global financial crisis circa 2011–2015.

Zombie formalism named the excesses in production and sales of abstract paintings in the art market. No aesthetic questions were being asked or answered. These were paintings that did not think or feel; or failed to make one think or feel beyond their formalist and hence descriptive qualities.

Following on from the survey of abstract painting at the RHA Dublin in 2022 entitled “In and of Itself — Abstraction in the Age of Images”, Callum Innes’s solo exhibition of abstract paintings at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin, the most market-reputable commercial gallery in Ireland, are difficult to appreciate beyond their formalist attributes, where paint is thin on application, and the alternating square and circle supports don’t live up to the idiom a square peg in a round hole.

My critical issue with paintings like this is, they sit in the anachronistic moment and movement of the avant-garde. “Make it new” the modernists said, until postmodernism said “make it new by recycling the old as new”. Postmodernism was the end of the manifesto and the notion of originality, manifested in the mainstream as the eternal return and reboot of Spider-Man.

The purpose for my visit to experience Innes’ paintings at the Kerlin Gallery was to expose a group of Psychoanalysis and Art students from Trinity College Dublin to artworks that resist interpretation with every formalist fibre of their material marrow.

I disagree with Robinson’s quip that “this kind of [abstract] painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.” I find no meaning here, either interpretative or influential. Agreed, there is what Robinson describes as the “ontology” of paint being exercised or exorcised here in terms of form, scale, gravity, and material heft. Yet I wonder why this type of painting still has a foothold in the market (does it?) if not the contemporary imagination. It could be its decorative neutrality: circles and squares can’t offend the shareholders. As someone who has been around the art block for a generation or two, I can’t imagine the new generation of artists being influenced by a painting methodology that is so repetitive and imprisoned by its own formalist quietism and acquiescence to a hermetic process that fails to look outwards beyond itself. We need artists to challenge the status quo of the bond they have formed with their chosen material. We need to be surprised by the breaking of such material bonds, not its market consistency.

It is interesting that the promotional image for the exhibition portrays Callum Innes in his studio with his back turned to the viewer, the splatter of painterly process less hesitant and more vital than the work chalk-outlined in the gallery. Here abstract painting is promoted as representational painting, the vitality of the artist pictured in the act of process over finish. The cynic or romantic might say that the death of painting is the moment when it is reified in the gallery as a luxury object worth its weight in market momentum.

Painted abstraction in its heyday, from Malevich to Mondrian, could be described as the avant-garde’s last stand before the leggy and promiscuous advent of other modes of speculative cultural production, from Pop to postmodernism. Abstraction, in its most image and content repressed states, was indeed revolutionary (in an artworld sense), the same way Impressionism was before Monet’s Waterlilies became the most popular kitsch postcard gift at museums.

That said, it must be noted that figurative painting in both traditional application (American Jenna Gribbon) and more abstract process (Irish painter Genieve Figgis) are at an all time market high, fetching 250k on estimates under 100k. So we could view, with rose in our tints, Innis’ commitment to abstraction as either radical or obsolete or indifferent to the status quo. Further, I want to make it clear that Innis represents a limit rather than a singular target in my personal criticism of abstract painting of the zombie kind.

Primed by my Psychoanalysis and Art students in tow, Slavoj Žižek tells us that Freud came up with a clever but paradoxical idea about form and content in relation to the dream. He said that the parts that the dreamer cannot fully recollect are part of the form of the dream. That we cannot separate form from content, no matter how opaque and defensive the form is.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had a similar insight to Freud when he said “The Medium is the Message”. This is a very agreeable perspective for the visual artist, where form becomes content and vice versa. American philosopher Graham Harmen says that artists don’t reduce objects to their mere function or form, but perceive objects, like a table, as a conjunction of the table’s materiality and its effects on humans. What effect does Innes’ paintings have on humans?

For me Innes’ paintings somehow erase the dream or the dreamer to present a tabula rasa of what he calls MATERIAL PRESENCE: “Full of humanity and fallibility, his art strives for a balance between precision and imperfection, opacity and luminosity, contemplation and material presence.” My struggle with this ideological list of method and experience is, they are too broad in their binary and oppositional continuum of experience.

My experience, albeit jaded by trying and failing to enter such abstraction after successive tries over successive years, is based in kitsch or pastiche rather than what is proclaimed in the press release as a “completely individual approach to painting that explores all these myriad possibilities”. This is the dinosaur avant-garde speaking from the extinction crater. Is this the selling point, a paradoxically consistent originality spread thinly over 35 years of making paintings?

Zombie Formalism brings up the problem of postmodernism itself, as a slippery moment that regurgitates the past in the present with kitsch results. It begs the question: is art the manifestation of a psychological process (art therapy for the artist) or a product to flip on the market? Or are such binaries unhelpful when it comes to questioning the purpose of art beyond its therapeutic or market value? Like big money, is art real, or just the waste product of a psychological process?

Here in the gallery, among these seven paintings, alternating between square and circle format without a spanner in their engineered formalism, I am left with the question proffered by artist Andrea Fraser: “What do I, as an artist, provide?” If we go back to Walther Robinson’s zombie formalism, we can locate value (if not meaning) in the collector and the art market, the very thing we (and perhaps the artist exhibiting) disavow when we freely enter the commercial gallery.

Innes’ paintings have moments that a fellow painter might find valuable in terms of technique, such as the painted slippages on the edges of the birch plywood and canvas supports they cling to. Yet the paintings’ language is minimal and not minimal enough, echoing the words of painter William de Kooning, who, cited by Susan Sontag in “Against Interpretation” said: “Content is the glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.”

But for those not intimate or sympathetic to the material swashbuckling of the painter, they will be confronted with a door, not unlike the Kerlin Gallery’s own covert gallery door on Anne’s Lane, without a handle or peephole to see beyond the surface of Innes’ thinglyness. A long time ago this attunement to paint as material was revolutionary, a reactionary necessity in the face of emergent technologies. Yet revolution always becomes the regime until the next revolution. I’m still waiting for the revolution. I want a revolution!—James Merrigan