In a sense all Gleeson’s recent work is infused with the sea – either overtly in serene beaches and seascapes, or tumultuous heaving waves; or, more abstractly, in the sense that many of his forms glisten as if wet and you can almost feel the moisture in his mists and clouds. The focus of this show is primarily on that aspect of the work – the sea.

Thales, one of the first Greek philosophers, argued that everything was water – in varying forms and guises; that rocks and stones, trees and plants, cats and dogs were all made out of the same basic substance. His follower, Anaximenes, argued in favour of air as the basic substance. In Genesis we read that in the very beginning the world was a heaving mass of water and that God’s first task was to create light, the second - air and atmosphere, the third - to separate land and sea; plants and animals came later. Modern science doesn’t quite agree with these views in a literal sense, but does allow for a mythical agreement: biologists hold that life on earth started in the sea, and they point out that water is the prime constituent of all living creatures. Just as interesting is the idea that our individual (intra-uterine) development from zygote to new-born child mirrors in a few months the billion-year evolution of life on earth from the first single-celled living beings right up to our present human state. In short, the earth as a whole and biological life in general (and each of us as individuals) started off as undifferentiated and amorphous; each evolves through time into its mature shape and form.

People often ask what Gleeson’s paintings are of. Intuitively they grasp they are not abstract, that they depict things and events in the world, that something (possibly momentous) is happening - but it is not clear exactly what. We certainly continue to divide the world into all sorts of categories. Land, sea and air. Solid, liquid, gas. Animal, vegetable and mineral. These basic divisions allow us both to live in the world and, at least in part, to understand it. A world as we now know it without these divisions is virtually incomprehensible. Gleeson seems to be painting a world when all these primordial categories were just beginning to operate. We could read Pandora’s Gateway as the depiction of the second day of creation when the very atmosphere itself was formed; or Sky Gardens or Re-articulations as scenes from the third day when the demiurge was half way through separating land and sea; Enclaves might be seen as depicting Thales’s beings literally coalescing out of the surrounding water, or, in a more modern guise, as the most primitive life forms emerging into being.

But ‘might’ is the operative word. For as well as being a surrealist, Gleeson is a highly skilled realist painter who can gauge exactly how many visual clues he must give us to allow an image to be interpreted. Time after time he stops short of providing them; so instead of being able to say ”it’s a ….. ” we find ourselves saying “it sort of looks a bit like a….. ” or “it vaguely reminds me of a….. ”. This deliberate ambiguity leaves us in a state of mental flux – unsure quite what to think. In this world where the distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral are blurred, it is often ambiguous as to whether a form is a wet expanse of rock, or of skin; a piece of seaweed, or of bone; a swirl of mist, or of water. Many viewers are disturbed by this and they soon start talking darkly about viscera, body parts and primeval slime.

But in the more atmospheric paintings (which predominate in this show) that aspect of the work is less overt than in some of the more “readable” (and sometimes frankly terrifying) paintings where claws and beaks and teeth mysteriously threaten, where eyes watch or stare (Headland, for instance). Such paintings can, and for many do, inspire physical fear and revulsion. This is both instant and instinctive: separating plants from animals is essential to our basic physical survival; those prehensile limbs are potentially fatal; being watched is the first stage of being hunted; and dismembered bones put an instant fear of death in us.

But this is not the only reading and personally I tend to read them another way. I see them as a great catalogue of incomplete and/or possible beings. The earth and all its contents, organic and inorganic, have evolved the way they happen to have evolved. Millions of different geological and living forms might conceivably have emerged from the primeval chaos – and many of them are possibly there in Gleeson’s paintings. So this view has him as a sort of surreal history painter - depicting the world before these fundamental separations and categories and shapes and forms came into their present shape - but where organic life is already, very definitely, in a state of incipient ferment, though in a manner only tenuously related to the actual way this all supposedly occurred. In some cases these paintings evoke that sense of mystery we feel in mist and fog where the edges of buildings and trees are blurred and the separation of air and land is vague. Getting back to Thales and Anaximenes, fogs and clouds are only vapourised sea, rain is condensed cloud, and the sea is the rain gathered up (by god or gravity) into its “appointed” place. Gleeson simply paints them while one or other of those two forces was beginning to work: rocks and bones, and sea and water – they all soar into the sky, while mist and clouds gather underneath.

Another unsettling ambiguity is the scale of events. Are we witnessing something huge, or tiny? Scientists have stretched our minds on this and talk in terms that our everyday understanding just can’t grasp: astronomers with their parsecs and light years, or nuclear physicists with their nanoseconds and billionths of millimetres. In this they are perhaps distantly related to those nature mystics who saw their god’s work as much in stars and storms and seas as is in twigs and pebbles and snowflakes. Gleeson seems as mesmerised by the vast geological forces that mould the earth as by the tiny accretions that occur in our backyards. The same forces that make river systems flow and erode are those that swirl the sand on the beach or the silt around a roadside gutter. In these paintings both scales seem to occur at once: microcosm and macrocosm co-exist in a spatio-temporal unity.

An analogy. Some artists separate their studio from their home (Gleeson) and some don’t (his friend Robert Klippel, for example, whose large, rambling and Dickens Ian house was filled with sculpture and basic materials in every possible state – from completed works to seemingly endless supplies of the bits and parts he would or might use at some future date). Gleeson’s paintings remind me more of Klippel’s house than his own in that they put me in mind of some mythical grand Creator of the cosmos whose vast workshop was filled with all the possible geological, meteorological and biological forms that might at some stage be used. Some won’t ever be needed and will end up on the tip – rather as all sorts of life forms have ended up on the scrap heap of history. We weren’t around to see the world when it was starting, or to watch the first of all the living beings knit themselves together. But if we had been, and if we’d had the microscopic and the macroscopic eye of god, they maybe we’d have seen what Gleeson seems to see in every picture. Another possibility: they depict the end, not the beginning. They are visions of organised being disintegrating back into its more basic and primitive forms.

This may not be for the squeamish: the sight of it all is fascinating, even sublime – but rarely serene or beautiful in a standard sense. (the sublime, by definition, has an edge of fear which has always brought a particular spice to the standard sense of beauty). Tension arises from this. For whilst the forms might, at first sight, be seen as ugly, the way they are painted is indeed beautiful – in a very standard sense. The paint is luscious to the point of seductive. Still, his taste for moist and liquid forms is bittersweet and there’s a degree of courage needed to get past this in rather the same way that gourmets with a taste for oysters, eels, tripe and strong cheese have usually had to overcome an initial distaste, or even revulsion. Not a few noted surgeons have, as undergraduates, literally fainted at their first contact with dissected flesh and bone; to practice their profession they must overcome this fear and learn to view the revealed organs with calm and knowledgeable detachment: disgust must make way for dispassion. On one thing they all agree: it was worth it. And this applies in endless fields of human understanding, scientific and artistic. In nature things and creatures are not in themselves beautiful or ugly – they’re just themselves – and a clear understanding requires suspension of aesthetic reactions. Conservative critics were as appalled by cubism as most of us are by snakes and spiders. Good things often need hard work.

Likewise, these paintings are not for beginners, or for decorators, or for those too easily put off. They are for thinkers and lookers. They are not for puritans, either. They have an opulence and a fecundity that borders perilously close to the lush. Artists can fall into various traps: the sterile, the absurd, the banal, the over-ripe, the sweet: all can turn from vice to virtue (and back to vice) in a single unguarded moment. It seems to be the business of art to walk close to these edges – but without falling in. If you’re not close to the edge, you’re not risking, not trying – so not an artist. If you fall in, you’re a failure – so still not an artist. In sport and war the most gripping contests are where the winners win by the skin of their teeth. Gleeson walks nail-bitingly close to lushness but never falls. He shares the precipice with the likes of those painters of baroque ceilings and domes with saints and sinners swirling up to heaven, or down to hell; with Wagner’s sonorous chords; and he seems to handle the sense of sight in the way Baudelaire treated the sense of smell.

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants
Doux comme des hautbois, verts comme des prairies,
- et d’autres, corrumpus, riches et triomphants,
ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,
comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.
(Correspondences, 1857)

There are scents as fresh as children’s flesh,
soft as oboes, green as fields
- and others, rich, corrupt, triumphant,
having the expansion of those infinite things,
like amber, balsam, musk and incense
which sing of the transports of spirit and senses

But for a leitmotif - all the time he keeps reminding us

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

C.N. 2004