Visual Art
Reviews
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The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 17 June 0000
Dirk Bell is something of an alchemist, brewing up a syncretic amalgam of symbolic imagery, mixing media to esoteric ends and turning graphite into gold.
Best known for his drawings, Bell here introduces photography into his practice, albeit obliquely. In ‘Painter', a ghost-image of a hanging sheet can be seen, just, beneath a surface of whorls and eddies, patterned like iron filings in a magnetic field. At the other extreme, ‘Monsoon’ looks as if Bell has directly manipulated photographic negatives, scraping away the dark to make light. And in between these two, things get interesting, with the line between photographic and drawn components in a work burned away to nothing. It is impossible to tell, for example,
David with the Head of Goliath by Will Daniels;
whether a darkroom fluke prompted the sublime chalk sketch of a male torso that dominates an untitled piece, or if Bell has deliberately framed his drawing with deep blacks.
This uncertainty holds: Bell works fast with loose logic, untangling a web of personal and private associations for his audience on a scale that is nothing short of mythic, co-opting and synthesising symbols that don’t so much defy interpretation as slip under its radar. There are spread wings everywhere, angelic or animal. Ringed planets orbit the letter ‘A’. A flayed dog attempts to leap from the guitar on which it is drawn to the guitar beside it.
Added together, the confusion of Bell’s dreamy world of obscurantist symbols, and the confusion of his slippery approach to media cancel each other out, like a standing wave, conjuring a solid body of work from fluid beginnings. (Jack Mottram)
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Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 22 Jun 0000
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90 THE LIST .‘5 Mm ~t5 Jurie 2006