Benny Merris: Bubble and Squeak

Benny Merris has been smoking it up in Amsterdam. He's been going through a hashish Renaissance, he tells me, and it shows. Each of the 19 paintings exhibited in this one-room exhibition have the hallmarks of a hallucinogen-addled author; that unique mix of intricacy and vibrancy with little in the way of gesture or spontaneity. As colourful as they are meticulous, each painting no doubt required the kind of concentration gained only through smoking a fat one.

The titles are likewise pretty far out. He's borrowed them from Walter Benjamin's book, On Hashish, about the author's experiences taking hundreds of puffs in various cities in Europe. This might sound like a gas to me or you but this was serious experimenting, with Benjamin writing up the results the next day, recounting that he well got the munchies and that.

As nice as the titles are, they seem a little arbitrary and when I'm discussing the use of impasto in Trombone Marmalade I could in fact be pondering the blobby use of paint in By Virtue Of My Smile and it wouldn't really matter.

A favourite of mine (perhaps it was None Better Orientated) was of the letter X painted in gradated tones of grey with the background a similarly gradated yellow. It is kitsch, witty and a little silly. Another (perhaps Cast Purpose to the Wind), is of a series of looping, multi-coloured stripes that equally suggests depth and flatness.

Merris explores abstraction like Benjamin experimented with dope – reckless but systematic. It goes to show that some things are best done when out of one's box, a rule perhaps applicable to writing reviews. [Andrew Cattanach]