Every painting by Michael Simpson presents an opportunity for the mind to race ahead, to imagine scenarios. Now in his 80s, his paintings are an unpeopled theatre of objects and allusions. For a long time they have intrigued me. There is something insistent, disturbing and highly individual about his art. With a few plainly described objects casting their scant shadows on the oil-painted surfaces – ladders, steps and portable ramps, vertiginous stairs, stools and benches, office chairs and closed cabins – they offer an invitation to the viewer to step into them. Everything is offered to us at the smallest remove. Come on in, they say, scale the ladder or take a seat. Except, mostly, you wouldn’t want to.
Something like a gigantically tall filing cabinet tilts at an angle on the surface of a painting called Reader, its drawer handles more like rungs to be climbed. Reaching high above our heads, this might not be a cabinet at all. It could be a gigantic munitions box or a coffin. The form is basic and rectilinear, the handles the product of simple machine shop factory engineering. The object teeters away from the vertical with no visible means of support, and climbs high, where a number of silhouetted objects drop from above, as though on cables. You can’t tell if they are books or computer screens or stone tablets. The purpose of this arrangement is unknowable. I imagine someone climbing those rungs then declaiming and hectoring an audience, as if in some avant garde theatrical performance in the Eastern bloc in the 1950s, shortly before the authorities barge in to close it down. The work of Polish artist and director Tadeusz Kantor comes to mind.
In Bench Painting 79, a similar, entirely black cuboid shape tilts up, this time from the horizontal. Fire flickers along its top edge and there’s a hint of smoke. You might think of one of those long charcoal barbecues in a Turkish grill, ready for kebabs. Or a piece of sci-fi minimalism that has caught fire on re-entering the atmosphere. Simpson refers to this obdurate form as a bench, one of many he has painted, all of which refer back to the Italian monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno. Here, the form is a sort of torture table as much as it is a judges’ bench or a catafalque. Bruno was pronounced a heretic and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, after seven years of inquisition and torture. He had espoused a number of views about Catholic doctrines and, extending the thinking of Copernicus, also proposed that distant stars were suns, with their own planetary systems that might harbour life and that the universe might be infinite. All this did not go well for him. Bruno’s years of misfortune and his horrible end in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori (where a statue to him stands today) are a recurrent source of imagery and Simpson has been thinking about him since his teens.
The observances and trappings of religious practice inform Simpson’s art at every level. Born in Dorset in 1940 and bought up by his Russian émigré mother, Simpson became an atheist at around the time of his barmitzvah, and much of his work of the past 30 years has been dedicated to what he calls “the infamy of religious history”. I’m less convinced by this bench painting (the image seems to lead us in too many directions at once) than by Simpson’s paintings of confession boxes here. Sitting square on the picture plane, these sinister blockhouses and kiosks reveal nothing. They look like an architecture of psychological experimentation. A pair of modern office chairs flank one, while in another, signs reading Confessionale hang to either side. Next to this box is a chair with a form that seems devised to contort and humiliate anyone who might think of using it. Its design harks back to some hopefully imaginary example of Italian modernist design from the 1930s.
Something similar is at play in a painting in which the word Greccio, seen in reverse, as though etched on to a pane of glass, leans against what appears to be a spidery contraption of black metal bars and wires. Both the support and the lettering on the glass have that same air of the period when Italian modernism and fascism accommodated one another. Greccio is a reference to a detail in Giotto’s 1295 fresco Institution of the Crib at Greccio, one of the painter’s cycle of frescoes depicting scenes from the life of St Francis, in the basilica in Assisi. Giotto records Francis’s institution of the idea of the nativity crib, when he placed a living child in the crib during Christmas celebrations. Giotto also depicts a wooden cross on a high wall, leaning away from the viewer, overhanging a space we cannot see and supported by ropes fixed to a wooden armature. Updating the arrangement and replacing the cross and its support in his painting, Simpson is playing a game with time and space, and the gimcrack theatre of objects and symbols with which painting abounds.
• Michael Simpson: New Paintings is at Modern Art, London, until 17 February.
