Stuart Shave | Modern Art is pleased to present our first solo show by Scottish artist Alan Michael.

Within Michael’s paintings and drawings is an understanding of the use of imagery as a tool of manipulation and mediation. The structure of Aesthetics and his use of the visual image’s ability to provoke recollection and reanimate meaning in the viewer, allow Michael to create layers of reference within a carefully choreographed pictorial landscape.

Taking images from popular culture and more recently from his own surroundings, Michael draws attention to patterns and structures of quotation in our daily experience of the visual world. Michael’s delicate paint and pencil strokes have a quality of line that give the work strength and realism. Michael also uses this realist quality alongside more overtly recognisable graphic references within advertising and the media. Taking on this resultant detritus of subconscious symbols and their associated inferences Michael allows them to build and converge within a singular image. Manoeuvring within the audience’s own personal memory, Michael sets up new associations and submerges narrative within intricate constructs of loaded imagery.

Exploring these notions within the context of the physical environment, Michael presents a series of new works for this exhibition in which he makes reference to the recent phenomena of design nostalgia and subsequent high-street Modernism. Other references from musical iconography, religion, psychoanalysis and the impenetrable edifices of contemporary Art Cinema, are subsumed within Michael’s deft interweaving of suggestion and exchange.