I like the paintings of Ryan Mosley, currently showing at London's Alison Jacques Gallery, for their marriage of grit and fantasy. Tough, hard-thought, intelligent textures – real painting, in other words – create realms of wilful play. Is it whimsy or is it tragedy? I'm not sure. The ambiguity interests me.
Let me put this praise in context. I am not saying Mosley is a genius, but I am saying this 30-year-old's first serious solo show is unusually promising, indeed that some of the promise is already fulfilled. Mosley's best paintings are his biggest. There's a fine freedom and confidence to his large, even slightly grandiose, pictures that imagine a balletic Wild West, as if painted by Antoine Watteau.
That 18th-century ghost haunts the best painting of all, a spacious white canvas with a minstrel playing a banjo – it's called Southern Banjo – beneath a tree. Isolated in his minstrelsy, at once proud and solitary, this timeless figure makes an immediate appeal to your sense of pathos. Mosley is a young 21st-century painter tackling themes comparable with those that Wallace Stevens described in his poem, inspired by Picasso, The Man With the Blue Guitar.
It's hard to be negative about any of the works here. What matters is the sense that here is a painter doing what painters need to do: work. He is thinking through paint, and finding in its demands a complex, skilled style of his own, in the only place this can be done, the studio.
Mosley has just been exhibited in St Petersburg – at the Hermitage, no less – in Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now. This survey comes to London in June. I wouldn't want to bet on its overall quality, but his encouragement (and collecting) of Mosley shows that Saatchi still has the ability to spot real talent first.
