Tom Ellis’s paintings and works on paper carry a fairly pessimistic commentary about what art can achieve and what it takes to get noticed these days. His subject matter is derived in part from Old Master catalogues and art history books, often taking the form of a painterly copy which he then defaces with marker pen – a sense of destruction and degeneration being part of the bleakly amusing appeal.
The subtler the alteration, the more sophisticated the outcome – as in a tiny, black-and-white reproduction of a seventeenth-century portrait from the Wallace Collection modified with a rubber so that the subject’s eyes are closed (and gaining an unlikely intensity in the process), and a small painting of a woman who, on close inspection, appears to be levitating.
In the main, though, this is an art that seems content to drag its heels as well as its knuckles – on the lookout for crude readings. Ellis’s crassness – a vulgar interpretation of a Virgin and Child, for example – can prompt laughter while masking a more complex mixing up of historical styles and tinkering with ideas of authorship. Yet, too often, what takes place feels like an easy way out for the artist, a means of him not having to mean it, looking cool while serving up a passable approximation of ‘edgy’ contemporary art. Except, of course, that we’ve been used to defilement as a convention in art ever since Duchamp scribbled a moustache on a postcard of the ‘Mona Lisa’ almost a century ago, and looking at Ellis’s art tends only to brings more radical models to mind.