Callum Innes painting at Kettles Yard.

Process painting can so often be seemingly anti painting, cold and purely formal, with that kind of Greenbergian rigid ideal that restricts association.

Callum Innes’ painting offers up a beautiful alternative. The ‘Monolgue’ series (which were on show at Kettles Yard in 2007) are, on the face of it, nothing more than a painterly experiment, epxloring the process of applinyg and then removing layers of paint which pour down the length of the canvas.

In that process, however, he finds something else. He finds some of the mystery which originally so fascinated him with mythology. They are about ‘being and not being’ to quote the Kettles Yard catalogue. That is, they are just as much about what we see and what we don’t see.

The narration of paint journey down the canvas and the forgotten memroeis of the layers which were removed and the paint which fell off. It simple yet evocative.

When you see then they have a sense of rightness which Greenberg would have enjoyed. Yet this comes not from paint ability to shut itself of from everything else, but from its ability to find within itself a sense of otherness. It is this otherness which Callum Innes paintings at Kettles Yard so eloquently articulate.