Private Eye

'I hate quotations'
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)

Alan Michael paints the densest paintings I've ever seen. They're not dense with pigment, or with theory (or at least not in a prêt-á-porter, picked up from a primer sense). Rather, their density is the density of a moment of extreme self-consciousness, in which one feels so present in the world, and yet so apart from everything else in it, that one's body or speech or thoughts become as heavy as a neutron star. While most paintings like to be looked at (you can tell by their coquetry, their choking neediness), Michael's seem to be a little less sure. Like a shy person at a party, it's not their diffidence per se that fascinates, but the fact that such diffidence is played out in public. Perhaps, though, the public sphere is the perfect place for introversion. At the very least, it provides the opportunity to hide in plain sight.

Michael's paintings have other, related, densities. Take his Misty in Roots (2001), a proposal for the cover of an imaginary magazine which references a flurry of cultural and political figures: the British dub group from which the work takes its title; the all-female American folk band The Roches; Demetrio Tsafendas, assassin of the architect of South African apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd; the Japanese novelist and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima; and Gunter Sachs, the photographer, astrologist and former husband of Brigitte Bardot. What's the connection between these individuals, save for their very different stabs at liberty, and why are their names - which appear in a crossword-like web of cover lines in the top right-hand corner of the piece - framed by a border of household pot plants painted in the style of early Lucian Freud? Given the international flavour of Misty in Roots' roll-call, we might interpret this flora as a note of domesticity, as a nod to how Michael has made room for Mishima, Sachs et al. in the front room of his mind. Plants, though, are indifferent to the niceties of nationality or cultural capital (they'll exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen with just about anybody), and I suspect their purpose here is to undermine any cross-referencing logic one might impose on the magazine's choice of cover stars. This is not to say Michael believes in blanket equivalence of cultural value - he's far too canny an observer of its ebb and flow for that. He is, however, suspicious of art that presents the viewer with little more than a pile-up of hip, politically charged references, as though their very mass might somehow magic meaning into being, like a rabbit from a hat.

Maybe this suspicion is a context thing. Michael is based in Glasgow, a city whose current art scene is largely characterized by artists who draw on research into various fields of academic or quasi-academic knowledge (medical history, Modernist architecture, the wilder shores of psychiatry) or else on a heart-on-their-sleeve fervour for youthful hobbies (skateboarding, football, playing in pop groups). Michael's work partakes of neither of these tendencies, but uses them a springboard to speak in a very nuanced way about the peculiar economy of quotation - its sanctions and rewards.

In the summer of 2003 Michael exhibited a suite of paintings entitled 'Burlesque Schematic' at a London gallery, Hotel, which loosely alluded to Lynne Ramsey's film Morvern Callar (2002), a post-Trainspotting (1996) piece of Jocksploitation replete with run-of-the-mill, thrill-the-middle-classes drug use, literary intrigue and a mildly unhinged protagonist. While he has little time for Callar, the artist has said that 'rather than present a series of reactions heavily signalling a critique of the film and its audience, my fantasy was to adopt its values'. This is a dangerous game to play. While satire provides a still point from which to speak about a turning world, Michael's strategy provides no such thing. Quotation depends on a cordon sanitaire of inverted commas. Do away with them, and something quoted might be mistaken for something meant.

Untitled (Night Club in Spain) (2003) is a take on Morvern Callar's impressionistic club scene, all streaky light and K-hole madness. Three heads run diagonally across the canvas, the largest of which seems to wear the other two around its neck like the shrunken skulls of its enemies. Each has the same Germanic, androgynous face, pinched from Pageboy (1980), Andrew Wyeth's painting of his neighbour Helga Testorf. Michael's use of Wyeth, here, is something of a puzzle. Were Untitled (Night Club in Spain) a simple critique of Morvern Callar, it would make sense to read the imported image as a vision of creative conservatism, which serves to underline the conservatism at the heart of Ramsey's film. This, though, is not the case, and there's something in the way Michael paints his Helga - perhaps the care he takes in tweaking her Midwest complexion until she resembles a waxy-skinned Scottish club kid - that suggests that his real concern is the moment when the source material he references fades into a new fiction. Untitled (The Fisherman) (2003) supports this point. Although the painting is based on a scene from Morvern Callar (a mute encounter on a boat between the protagonist and a fisherman), it's hard to see precisely how. A nearly full-bleed image of a pale, corpse-like face flushed here and there with green and purple pigment, it resembles a still from a classy-looking, Caledonian-tinged horror flick. For all this, though, the piece retains Ramsey's visual rhetoric, an ever so slightly overripe realism that screams, 'Hey, middle-class cinema-goer, this movie's for you!' Michael's argument, here, isn't so much that style transcends narrative, but that style is a narrative in itself.

Looking at art demands knowledge of other art, as well as of film, history, politics and all the rest. When we visit exhibitions, we accept this pretty happily (we may even preen a little if we pick up on a semi-obscure reference, especially if there's no mention of it in the exhibition's accompanying bumph). But if referencing is fundamentally a social contract, it often seems like Michael's torn it up. Take his Untitled (2003), in which a young woman sits before a flock-papered wall, her fingers half-heartedly raking her long, grubby blonde hair. When Michael took the photograph on which the painting of the woman was based, she was drunkenly watching Glasgow's Orange Walk, a pugnacious, politically difficult affirmation of Protestant identity. Following the photo's transition to canvas, all outward signs of her sectarianism disappeared, apart perhaps from the (vaguely empurpled) red, white and blue of her shell-suit. If one peers closely enough, however, and if one is privy to Michael's private language, there are hints at her mind-set in the highly stylized designs on the wallpaper. Half-hidden by a gaseous green and purple murk, they are derived from the work of the Spectator cartoonist Michael Heath, which imagines a little Britain in which the Right are always right. Both the Orange Walk and Heath's cartoons are the products of closed eyes, minds and hearts, which makes it all the more curious that Michael chose not to expose them to potential criticism but instead to concrete over them not once, but twice: firstly with a near-impermeable private language, and secondly with a sheen of pearlescent, perfectly handled paint. Perhaps he's decided that art should not do journalism's job, and should instead operate as a stopper in the jar, a problem, an impediment.

In an early interview Michael commented: 'Someone once said to me "Why would you put something you're interested in into your work?" and I kind of agree with that.' I've no idea if he's interested in footwear or not (I've never looked at his feet), but it's been turning up a lot in his recent works, including Untitled (2004), a bizarre assemblage of Cheneay brogues, a British brand that has considerable cachet among the Mediterranean's rich. In Michael's hands these shoes are all burnished toecaps and thick, buttery uppers, their laces looping through the eyelets with taut, effortless precision. Untitled is a beautiful painting, and if - like many of Michael's other works - it initially appears difficult, or obtuse, it's worth asking whether things that are truly worthwhile ever come with an explanatory note.