Key to the show is Welcome, 2000, a ludic rendering of one of his earlier door paintings but with an arc painted as a smiling mouth. It confounds the conceptual workings of his earlier work (not on show) and reveals the ludicrous in much of what is here.

Pop associations are evident but dark. The bloodless face of Michael Jackson stares out from a circular panel, and that black-hole nose on a pink relief face might be that coke hole of Daniella Westbrook or Jackson's failing nose job.

Patsy Kensit, 1994, drools, glossy pink thumb in green lips, her features reduced to a subcutaneous relief under high gloss. The pop iconography here is lifeless, reflective, synthetic, an apt realism in designer chic.

Madonna, 1993, is one of Hume's first moves away from the tautology of those door paintings. The iconic set the tone for much of his work to date. The Young mother and child, 2001, is a sinister mix of Piero della Francesca and Tim Burton. A black-and-green, red-eyed mother cradles a silver-eyed blue boy, deathly and nightmarish.

The painting Baby, 1994, cradles a red-eyed infant staring out past the mirror writing of its title. The schematic, customised graphic style belies the claustrophobic and anaemic ambience of this show; akin to Luc Tuyman's work, but macabre in the denatured synthetics of the high-gloss materials and the seamless methodology.

The numerous childhood references give some pieces a dreamy innocence and others a more nightmarish cast. There is a haunting incongruity between the subjects and their appearance. The absurd underscores Hume's move from the formal to a reversion to representation, but he sticks to the cool methodology and materials.

The monumental doodles of She, 1999, and Belarus, 2000, are testimony to a nihilistic absurd in the artist's pursuit of meaningful subject matter. The linear face of She is a doodle enlarged to monumental scale. At three metres square, its grandiose scale, ominous, fetishistic black gloss and ludicrous subject lead to a headbanging mix of conflicting readings. It is a grand ludic sign of the infantilism of premillennium London.

Earth Angel, 1999, is a similarly grand-scale doodled face. The linear features in positive relief, the lines of the face flow like green canals through a raised umber ground.

There is in these particular works a conflict of the cool formal means grafted onto the absurd subject matter, the whole again cut down to size by choice titles such as Bag of sweets, 2002, and Puppydog, 1994. It's a kind of desperate need to avoid pomposity, pomposity that is often read into the formal nature of the door paintings.

The sculptures of Snowmen in this show are a new venture for Hume. They too point to the process of denial at work. One walks around these familiar figures only to find they are featureless. One is forever looking at the back of that snowman whose face continually eludes us, a fitting analogy for Hume's continual flight through his use of reflective surfaces.

His latest work, such as Young Nun, 2002, and Flowers from Jerusalem, 2002, mark another shift that takes its lead from Sigmar Polke and Francis Picabia - the familiar play of figure and ground, or the repeatedly drawn figure of a young woman superimposed over an incongruous ground. It seems like a step backwards, as it resorts more to picturing and it negates the strengths of his works' methods and materials. The pieces seem more like a matter of productivity than development.

The interplay of subjects, and Hume's continued shifts in focus regarding how his work handles its formal vocabulary both point to a painter who is at ease with the ludic yet uneasy with the theoretical route that led him to his very cool methodology. His continued flight from the label 'high-brow' and his magpie-like choice of shiny new signs make his endeavours unique, but the designer chic of these paintings makes one hungry for more substance and a more coherent pursuit of meaningful content.

Damien Duffy is an artist living and working in Derry.

Gary Hume, IMMA, Dublin, April - June 2003

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