The Paintings of Christopher Aggs Julian Bell indentSomeone has to do it. Through the last twenty years, countless painters have made their reputations from painting ‘badly’. Badness - cack-handed draughtsmanship, blundering palettes, wince-making uncertainties of tone - has a lot of good in it: it promises a shortcut to expressive excitement, or a freedom from received standards. Bad painting is a big, inviting free-for-all, and obviously a necessity for the economy of art. But as an objective, it rather loses its savour if no-one, by contrast, is painting well. Chris Aggs paints well. His work holds up a standard of achievement which is getting far too marginalized by current criticism. On one level, the excellence should be evident to anyone looking at his still-lifes, landscapes and interiors: here is painting that straightforwardly delivers. It returns to the viewer the pleasures of looking at the world, yet brings them together in a fresh, more coherent structure. The cherries in his Brass Tray are succulently, sensuously full of themselves, but they find their place within a resolved formal logic of diagonals and curves. Another still-life sets buttercups before a biscuit-tin, with each component seeming to gain in quiddity from the contrast of fleeting and solid. The fact that painting can make sense of everyday visual experience in this way is a very old claim to advance for the art’s importance; but for just that reason, this basic business of intelligent representation needs to be constantly revitalised. Working from materials immediately to hand, Aggs does just that. What he does is ‘good painting’ in a narrower sense also. Its methods endorse Sickert’s 1908 prescription for ‘bonne peinture’: ‘ the clean and frank juxtaposition of pastes (impastos), considered as opaque, rather than as transparent, and related to each other in colour and values by the deliberate and conscious act of the painter”. Even if Cézanne and Morandi are Aggs’ more immediate touchstones, he also holds to this distinctly English ethos by eschewing flash brushwork and the legerdemain of glazes. All relations of tone and hue, plane and edge, volume and void are set down in stoutly brushed, resolutely material pigment. The plein air paintings often come together round magically lyrical foci of colour: the blue of a far hill seen through winter woods, the interlock of hot and cold hues in the trunk of a fallen tree. But it is an earned magic, a fully paid up and declared poetry. In considering this, maybe we come near to the ambition of these paintings. Their emphatic solidity of construction by no means seeks to do away with symbolic and associative possibilities. It simply wants to let those properties emerge, as it were, from the integrity of the objects themselves. Those children hurtling down a path in early spring are not without an emblematic dimension, but there’s no authorial arm-twisting to compel you to assent to it. If the banana jutting over the table-edge has a below-the-belt rudeness, then the humour seems to belong to nature rather than the painter’s whimsy. Aggs speaks of yearning to do a ‘world view’ -- perhaps Landscape with Children is a prospectus for one -- but says that it would have to be a view he had directly observed. Invention would come too close to falsity. He makes life difficult for himself: but for that reason, his painterly virtue is not a complacent rectitude. It is the kind of active desire for good which consists in a life spent seeking out forms of truth. Such a life can be quite solitary. Though these are not expressionistic paintings, they allow expressive things to happen - one of them being the evocation of the chilly, blue reserve from which the painter must do his observing in The Studio Window. The painting sets its primary focus on the brights sheds and shrubs seen through the window-frame, but opening its field of enquiry wider and deeper, it introduces a sense of the painter’s presence in the distended angles of the extreme foreground and his detached reflected hand. The same root fact of being one pair of eyes taking on the world becomes the generative principle behind the multiplied selves of Dressing Table Mirror Against the Window. These are paintings that seem to have found their own distinctively sombre emotional pitch through the sheer clarity with which they disentangle visual evidence. Like the more celebratory aspects of Aggs’ rich and developing oeuvre, they perform the rare feat of making integrity seem freshly compelling. Julian Bell July 2000 Julian Bell is a distinguished painter and author. His recent book: ‘What is Painting? - Representation and Modern Art’ is published by Thames and Hudson ( ISBN 0-500-28101-7).