The contemporary British painter George Shaw has something in common with the Greek-Italian modern artist Giorgio de Chirico. Both paint eerie depopulated scenes in which time appears to stand still. But where De Chirico pictured early 20th-century Italy as a frozen world of empty sun-bleached piazzas, classical ruins and railway stations, Shaw portrays a Britain of run-down estates, bus stops, muddy lanes and empty football pitches.
Or perhaps that comparison is uncalled for. Perhaps Shaw has more in common with the English landscapes of Gainsborough, but if so, he grabs the great tradition by the scruff of the neck and rubs its face in the dirt. The landscapes he paints are incomplete, bereft. All his paintings recreate the places of his own adolescence: a Britain of the recent past. The Midlands estate his imagination haunts is set on the edge of countryside, so wooded lanes and dense foliage skirt its borders – but they become sinister and darkly humanised in his depictions. Murder lane, condom copse.
Shorn of people, it is the scenography of everyday life that achieves poetry in these paintings. A wall spattered with red – paint or blood? – is called Poets Day. In another painting we see a dilapidated public library. If Shaw looks back to a Britain of the 1970s and 1980s, his morbid nostalgia now has a more political edge, in spite of his introspective intentions. It might be argued that Britain is about to take in reality the same journey he takes in imagination, back to neglect.
In the end, it is a poignant eye for images of eerie emptiness that makes Shaw special. In his painting The End of Time, currently on view at Baltic, we see a band of grey road in the foreground, then a strip of yellow and green grass divided into parched rectangles, then winter trees stark and black, and beyond them houses beneath a battleship-grey sky. This painting makes clear my comparison with Italian metaphysical modernism. Shaw has found, in the dry pools of memory, a landscape of infinite mystery. He reveals great voids of darkness at the heart of ordinary life. He is doing something rich and strange, and his paintings are among the truly outstanding and worthwhile creations of 21st-century Britain.
