Jeremy Millar @ CCA

The first piece encountered in Jeremy Millar’s current show, Resemblances, Sympathies and Other Acts, is one that hauntingly resonates after viewing. Commissioned by the CCA, the unsettling Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows) is a good introduction to the show – and to Millar’s work in general. The lifelike sculpture lies face down covered in mysterious, round marks, darkly compelling and imbued with a sense of menace. Referencing Hippolyte Bayard’s photograph Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, it poses the hypothetical paradox of the dead artist creating work.

Filled with literary allusions, his work, whether sculpture, photography or installation, is imbued with a sense of narrative. One such reference is turn of the century, supernatural fiction writer Algernon Blackwood’s short story The Willows. It tells the tale of two characters travelling though a threatening environment and coming across the body of a drowned peasant, covered in odd marks.

In the series of photographs, A Work for WG Sebald, the artist highlights the connections between Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn and the Peter Greenaway film Drowning by Numbers. The resulting photographs document the residual smoke of a firework, let off at the site of Sebald’s fatal car crash. The artist’s sense of the mystical allows him to see Sebald’s approving face appear out of the smoke in the final photo.

The theme of ritual is repeated in Millar’s installation Incomplete Open Cubes (Burnt). Multiple, white, cube frames – referencing an earlier Sol LeWitt work – have each had a corner removed, burnt and placed, pyre-like, in the middle of the geometric structure. It reminds us that art is no less mystical, despite its apparent austerity and rationalism.

The final piece, a kaleidoscopic video installation, has the feeling of an occult spell, with hypnotic images beguiling the viewer along with a chant-like score, with words borrowed from French intellectual Roger Caillois.

Millar’s philosophical, literary and artistic references give his work depth and a sense of history, while his multi-disciplinary approach makes for an adventurous and exciting show.