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Brooding, sentimental and passive, Anne Wallace's oil paintings appear profoundly conservative and not a little unlike English nee-Romantic painting from the late 1940s such as that of John Minion. They escape, however, the fate of charm because they are unnaturally self-contained and their stripped-down rhetoric is that of an austere neo-classicism, suggesting the unexpected communication of an ethical dimension usually dismissed in contemporary art. The considerable attention surrounding the work of a young artist such as Wallace, demonstrated in surprisingly large gallery traffic, favourable reviews and considerable sales, testifies to the theory that Anne Wallace's paintings strike a contemporary nerve. It is doubly surprising, then, that her figure compositions are both so utterly different from the irredeemably trashy art repeatedly lionised in many magazines and curated exhibitions, especially that of the 1995 Perspecta, and from the equally sterile, reactionary expressivity beloved of the art world's aging conspiracy theorists. Apparently, the resurfacing of literate painting-avoiding at the same time, in this inherently conservative medium, a traditional valorization of the heroic figure of the artist-answers a widely felt but contradictory cultural need.
Critical strait-jacketing will endlessly argue against any such ability to repoliticise, in effect, figurative painting-to remobilise the complex cultural conversations of resemblance and poetics located in mimetic representation. Such an aim inevitably steers dangerously close to both obscurity and banality even though these were exactly the qualities most valued by the last decade's major grandfather figures from Andy Warhol to Bruce Nauman. There is, nevertheless, a widespread prevailing interest-clear in conversations with any number of young artists- in the possibilities of a melancholic artistic language as conservative as that of Anne Wallace. Such renovations of seemingly exhausted cultural forms have