He dared to leap out over the challenging abyss. He dared to abandon the well-known, to hit the reset button on an esteemed carrier already several decades long. He challenged himself at a mature age to begin all over, to test himself and his public with the built-in requirement that this journey was in part towards an unknown destination. And the artist was no longer middle-aged, but rather at this point, when you see this exhibition, the pictures have been made by an artist who is really only four years young. The journey, simply said, has merely just begun and it seems full of possibilities. And now when he’s landed on the safer side so entirely convincingly with these two coinciding and contemporary exhibitions, they resound with creative energy, a decent amount of revenge-tinted rage, and the rarely seen ability to alight on creativity’s feet again, shaken, but in my eyes unscathed – yes, reincarnated.

When I saw these pictures for the first time, I thought about an oak hillside in late autumn. Not because these pictures had any outward resemblances as such, but rather because it is the classic European landscape in a quintessential meaning which often is or has been the starting-off point for the visual arts. Nature and landscape are still now the backboard in many of the new pictures, but it has more to do with the technique he uses, no, better said, is inventing. This very idiosyncratic method and media are still in their development phase. Here you will find an integral journey which, fascinatingly enough, is not yet over. I’m thinking most of all about the investment of energy which this method requires. It provides as an additional benefit an overwhelming visual impact. Think of it like this: An oak hillside, the ground covered with dry, rustling, nut-brown oak leaves, and then a grainy snow begins to fall. Listen! Do you hear how the rustling begins softly, scattered, and hesitantly, eventually filling the air with an all-encompassing sound which becomes a sort of virtual room entirely for itself out there in the overall silence of late autumn, out in nature. This is precisely what I hear, but internally, mentally – which happens due to the visual energy in these works – when I see his paintings (or however we choose to describe the technical character of these new works).

First, perhaps, we should approach the break, the exchanging of the visual world. The fracture is interesting in all forms of renewal, what we choose to abstain from, which road we follow and what we consider bringing with us from the old or what we physically leave behind. Above all, though, it takes courage, to dare to expose oneself, perhaps towards a potential and total failure - not least in creative situations or roles. Perhaps the courage to dare to break ourselves loose, to loom large as the only route because the position in life one has hitherto lived is eroding quickly and threatens to disappear completely. In such a self-reflecting or due to outside forces imposed situation, the choice is perhaps not so difficult – but requires great energy.

James Bates’ new road, and the fracture in his art, is as much exciting as it is outwardly interesting. Let us examine that fracture a little closer: it has both sharp and soft edges. It has cracks reaching back into childhood. And it is as previously stated a newly reborn artist, only four years old, despite his having reached fifty years in age, who on his own with undauntedly open eyes, broke the limb he was sitting on. That takes a great deal of courage.

For a long time, James Bates’ previous direction was sculpture. With his classical education it was nevertheless a sculptor who under post-modernism’s 1980’s broke with tradition and classical materials, though without losing the traditional sculptural heavyweights such as plasticity, a sense for materials, space, and the power of expression. And the latter was representative for his work as a sculptor. All artistic expression is strongly attached to memory and time. It can be about a close-at-hand memory or an errant fragment from childhood which suddenly or repetitively is re-summoned to the present. Artistic actions and works deal often with this return to core memories or events from the past which are repeatedly reworked, twisted and turned, pushed away into the background and plucked up again, caressed or hated. Perhaps something which dislodges pain, fear, desire, or speechless security. It is in some fashion the principal magic which has encompassed and encompasses the art of James Bates, irregardless of whether it’s sculpture or painting. However, here on this broadly planned ”return”, in which he performs as a painter, can an earlier link to painting be found dating back to his childhood. The painting can be seen in one of the two current exhibitions. It is a strikingly competent painting produced by a teenage student, the motif is his own school and its surroundings. Through his forward-looking art teacher, James Bates was allowed to test out real oil paints, and of course received good guidance from his interested teacher. The result is this painting. It hovers there in the background as an important benchmark of conquest prior to his new painting so many decades later. Not least after such important stops along the path of his life such as art school in Liverpool and the Royal College of Art in London, and subsequently, instead, at least primarily, expressing himself through his groundbreaking sculpture.

There is, however, a consistency in what James Bates does irregardless of which medium and materials he chooses, and it has to do with process. It is this that is important. This is where the energy is invested and it is there that it is extracted or brought to light. Sculpture is, in a wide sense, not merely forming an idea of something physical, but also forming material in relation to that idea – the physical process. For it is that which can be seen in his new pictures – painting as a physically intense activity. His new pictures are exceedingly about this: to explore, to sound out the potential expression of the materials, their horizon of formulation. One can talk about the new paintings as panels endowed with a sensitive skin. A thick, tangible, and physically perceptible painterly surface, scarred, wounded, healed, bruised anew. Or how the intense and copious scrapings on the floor of his studio from the reworking of the pictures, when he physically and directly chisels, carves, and scrapes forth the motif from the paint and encaustic he has applied, become reused as ballast in the new layers of color on the next painting. The process could hardly be more physically evident, a straight-up kind of genetic continuation into the next picture, or a compulsive thought where the energy of the work, the left-overs, are recycled and reborn all the time. The dynamic is striking. The artwork as an idea tumbles forth as a perceptible force in the work’s immediate waste scraps - in that which is taken from individual paintings, the reduction itself, the rejected – as if it is the production itself which is the true artwork and the images possibly by-products or checkpoints which allow the thought process to survive. His work with the production of these pictures has occasionally resembled a nearly industrial process of production, not in the sense that he has repeated the same motif over and over again, but rather in the sheer amount and level of effort, in the in- and output. It is genuinely impressive and overwhelmingly powerful.

If James Bates’ sculptural works were built with more of a suggestive material sense and toned-down colors, but a more heavily emphasized physicality within the object, then his new work owns as well this physicality as a wound-up, yes, noisy colorant. The colors are intense, they have at times been slushily sedimented. Painting as a littered deposit filled with fantastic articulation, and descriptions not merely compositional in substance, but rather in their conglomeration, a direct, physical painterly depth. It is not painting which chooses to use the medium’s traditional hide-and-seek game between it’s professionally controlled surface and the textures it seeks to depict, represent. This painting is far more brutal than that. One can actually describe a powerful painterly body with monstruous features which have a tendency towards the chaotic and uncontrolled, the excessive. In these pictures there is an undeniably physical presence but also a strong inner picture of a symbolic landscape. They have a surreal undertone which is approached by a rebellion against normality. Many of the compositions start out from randomly chosen points of departure, a postcard, an image from a newspaper. There is an unintentionality in the motif by the choice of the mass-media’s standard fare, but which James Bates transforms into something with nearly demonic power. He strips unabatedly from us the invisible normalcy for that which burns behind it or probably should: life itself which otherwise would merely tick away towards death, if we fail to gain control over the flux of time, the choices in our lives, the intentions of other people to interrupt the cycles of our lives or to help them up the pile. Sometimes I sense a sort of frustrated fury or tempest in these pictures which balance between complete harmony and chaos, between dissolution and structure. They resound of that certain tone of mental snow granules which are drawn forth within the observer’s inner world. The pictures sing of the energy field that the artist has left behind him by the way in which he exposed himself at the onset of each painting’s inception. There is no guaranteed result here.

You must receive these pictures as they are. What they are is an uncertainty to me in regards to strictly determining genre. And that is not interesting, either. Painting is one of many forms of expression in contemporary art. James Bates could have chosen something completely different, such as digital photography or installations built with a relative esthetic (which several of his larger sculptural works have done, by the way), but he has chosen another route instead, which is partially new, partially old, where there are pitfalls of tradition one can fall into and new invisibilities to be stumbled over. There is a rough and charmingly unpolished sheen over these two collections of paintings. At heart they are incredibly beautiful paintings, beautiful in the sense that they without embellishments reflect, or represent life. Both in the vast expanse, in our own environments, our landscapes and our dreams and phases, and they simultaneously give us symbolically loaded passengers to our inner worlds without an ounce of idyllic dissemblance. They are paintings which can be equally as corrosive as exhilerating, as seductive as distressing. Please, you must remember that these have been made by a barely four-year-old artist with the experience of a middle-aged man. The expanse of time is enormous and the energy equally so. It is art which is as ugly as new and searchingly uncertain of it’s actual breadth and developmental horizon. It remains promising enough for both the artist and the rest of us to be able to discover.

You hear of course how, afterwards, the grains of snow give life to the landscapes in his pictures? It is rustling in the leaf piles to which James Bates repeatedly returns, drives together, divides, rends apart and forms again with this kick-ass, breathtaking painting.

STEFAN NILSON

Art Critic