Seemingly scientific

Oliver Marsden's abstract paintings.

There is an increasing range of imagery in non-figurative or wholly abstract art that is unthinkable without the imaging techniques of recent science. And yet the works themselves tend not to illustrate science, and do not even draw specifically on one kind of scientific image. The beguiling and technically impeccable paintings by the young British artist Oliver Marsden are spectacular cases in point.

A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, Marsden is rapidly marking out a distinctive territory for himself. At the tender age of 28, he has already exhibited internationally, including shows at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York. At first sight, his enticing images, on canvases generally more than a metre square, look as if they are taken from science: from cellular and microbiological formations in the earlier works, or from the undulating surfaces of materials viewed in electron microscopes in recent paintings. But they have acquired their scientific 'look' through Marsden's absorption of the vocabulary of those types of images, rather than because they depict specific substances or phenomena.

The old masters selectively remade specific kinds of natural effect rather than imitating what was in front of them (as they obviously had to do when painting a Crucifixion or Rape of Europa). Similarly, Marsden uses his understanding of the nature of visual effects in scientific imaging to create forms that speak of, and transform, the visual repertoires of contemporary science.

In particular, his paradoxical forms — which appear real and suggestively solid but tend towards physical impossibility and are ultimately nebulous — are in keeping with the problems that indeterminacy of position and state cause for representation in modern physics.

Marsden's latest exhibition, “Waveform 1 2001”, is characteristic of recent work in that it has its origin in manipulated three-dimensional shapes on a computer screen. The results are then photographed as 'sketches' for the paintings. Using a combination of conventional brushes and airbrush sprays on immaculately prepared surfaces, the stunning finish of the images results from an interplay between meticulous control and serendipitous process. Marsden relies on what he calls “balanced chaos”.

That his pictures are actually painted and not computer-generated matters greatly to Marsden. Their materiality and the traditional connotations of paint on canvas are integral to their effect and to their dialogue with science. Marsden is also aware that the technique of a hand-made artefact evokes the spectator's awe in a way that computer art still tends not to do.

WaveForm 1 plays tricks with visual grammar. Credit: OLIVER MARSDEN/BLUE GALLERY

WaveForm 1 looks as if it is the depiction of something tangible. Yet the sharp, contrasted contours of some forms, which lead us to expect that we are dealing with hard, reflective surfaces, melt into the soft convexities and concavities of particulate clouds. Like the 'pictures' generated by a scanning tunnelling electron microscope, his images obey some of the grammar of things seen within our normal visual compass. But they fail to deliver the full range of internally consistent information about the interplay of light and shade and colour and texture to which we have become accustomed in naturalistic pictures, no less than in nature itself.

Marsden is a keen student of the writings of the nuclear physicist David Bohm, whose notion of 'implicate order' has proved particularly suggestive for artists and non-scientists. Bohm's intuition that there may be a level of order that is inevitably inaccessible to our means of scrutiny is suggestively invoked by the fluidity and ambiguities of Marsden's visual conundrums. The artist brings the time-honoured alchemy of pigment on a flat surface into dialogue with the most advanced techniques of imaging in the physical sciences. It is specifically in the tension between the hand-made and the instrumentally generated that an important facet of the fascination of his paintings lies.

Oliver Marsden's “Waveform 1 2001” is on show at the Blue Gallery, 28/29 Great Sutton Street, London EC1, UK, until 1 December 2001.

Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science is a collection of essays edited by Martin Kemp (published by Oxford University Press and the University of California Press; £20, $35).