Altered States of Paint @ DCA

Altered States of Paint is one of those rare curatorial gems not often seen outside of London. There is a certain implicit logic to the selection of works that is so understated that it can only be put down to curatorial intuition. And on first viewing the show I couldn’t help thinking (being Greenbergian at heart) that its brilliance had a lot to do with it being medium specific. It’s about painting and what painters do these days. And like all good painters, the selected artists are exploring what it means to paint, eking out those boundaries that define the medium and fiddling with them like deviants on a crowded train. However, a word of warning: to fully appreciate the curatorship, do not read any of the official gallery information or press release – a mad load of wank.

As well as referencing Ken Russell’s film, Altered States, the gallery hand-out quotes from Aldous Huxley’s book, Doors of Perception, which is all about how it feels to get mad-with-it on drugs and is said to have had a profound effect on the Hippie generation of the 1960s. But just as there is no doubt that most Hippies necked acid before reading this classic work of writer-come-tripper, I have no doubt the curator had seen the underlying relationship between these disparate works before grafting Huxley into the picture. For instance, whilst Till Gerhard, Rabiya Choudry and Andreas Dobler are all definitely in the stoner camp, no door of perception through the Huxley household connects their work with the work of Angela de la Cruz or Neil Clements – straight edge gloss that alludes as much to decay as it does to modern ideals. But let's pretend we never read any of that guff and talk about the art instead.

Neil Clements’ large, shaped canvases taunt the architecture of the gallery with their measured asymmetry. Morosely black, with a little touch of grey caressing one arm of an obtuse angle, ’85 unashamedly references 1950s art history. It re-enacts the turn from abstract expressionism and the usurpation of Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting. And to add insult to injury, its shape is derived from a guitar associated with curly-haired metal bands of the 80s. A little room at the back of the gallery seems to have been given over to a collection of his lesser works, curiously lit by a window with a pleasant view – not very rock and roll.

Angela de la Cruz’s works become wonderfully painterly in the context of this show. She has a love of folds and creases akin only to Ingres’. And like Ingres’ fetishistic sheets and garments, de la Cruz’s Super Clutter XXL manages to reference the body in all its pink grotesqueness. A labial canvas is pushed in on itself to reveal a wooden structure beneath. It seems to have had suffered some entropic nightmare: a painting crushed by the gravitational pull of its own historical context, perhaps?

Rabiya Choudry’s paintings seem pleasantly playful from a distance; a number of small colourful images with black outlines fill the surface from edge to edge, at once carefully arranged and yet wanting to burst out of their confines. On closer inspection you see that the depictions are a little less wholesome than first expected. One painting in particular seems to be mainly made up of cocks. They are here presented in all shapes and sizes, and one in particular has a cracking big bend in it and a helmet that flares out like a mushroom head. The whole ensemble is oddly macho for a work that seems to be attacking machismo. Nevertheless, there appears to be enough humour there to rival any dick-swinging antagonism.

Till Gerhard’s works are both nostalgic for the Hippie ideal and an epitaph to its decaying ideology. They are figurative and psychedelic in equal measure, peopled by strange cults that emit rays of coloured light from their heads. One painting, Solar System, shows a large reproduction of The Rolling Stones' album cover, Hot Rocks, which shows silhouettes of the band members’ heads, one inside another like a Russian doll. But Gerhard has added a dual light source at the centre of the picture, like two wide, benign eyes, staring out at you from the depths of Keith Richards’ head. Evil seems to lie beneath.

If this show is really about altered states and perceptual transcendence, it only arrives at this through an obsession with the past. These works clearly have a specific relationship with history and how ideas and ideals come and apparently go, only to be found rotting in the cellar, stinking up the rest of the house. Occasionally we might venture downstairs, lift the corner of the tarpaulin and take a peek at the mangled bodies beneath – Greenberg’s dead eyes peer past you into the horizon of categorical perfection; a Hippie, long dead, still wears the horrified expression of his last, fatal trip; a feminist, kicked to death by her own misogyny, breathes her final breath. But this show goes that bit further. The dead are taken upstairs for a while and introduced to some untimely friends. The dead walk the DCA until 7 September.