Something that happens to you a lot if you are an art critic is that people ask you if you can draw. “Have you ever wanted to be an artist?” they gently goad. It’s a predictable question, underpinned by the assumption that art critics are failed artists who have turned to the next best thing. In my case, it was almost true. I did fancy myself once as a talented draughtsman, and indeed my first “job” in the media was working as a cartoonist for a listings magazine that had started in Manchester. After a few weeks, the editor turned to me and sighed: “These are really shit. Is there anything else you can do?” As I was studying art history at the time, I offered to write some exhibition reviews. The rest you know.
So, yes, the love of art was immutable in me. There was nothing else I wanted to do. But rather than thinking of myself as a failed artist turned critic, I think of myself as a writer whose subject is art. Some people write crime thrillers. Some people write cookbooks. I write art reviews.
That is not the case, I believe, with my colleague Matthew Collings, whom you may know from the London Evening Standard, where he has been shipped in recently as the replacement for the late Brian Sewell. Collings has quite a record as an art critic. He has written some cracking cultural summaries, notably Blimey!, the story of Brit Art. And, of course, he’s been on the telly a lot, bumbling about charmingly, sharing his quirky understanding of the progress of art. This Is Modern Art, his best series, won him a Bafta in 1998.
All this is impressive. However, what I have always liked most about Collings is the fact that he has simultaneously remained a practising artist whose views are shaped from the inside. Back in the day, when we both started scrambling up the slippery pole, Matt used to be a British version of a German expressionist and made noisy paintings full of big gestures and pumped-up pictorial drama. I never had the heart to tell him his faux-Teutonic pictures were awful. But they were.
So it is with genuine pleasure that I can now confirm that his latest work is anything but awful. The new selection of paintings by Biggs & Collings that has gone on show at the Vigo Gallery in central London is beautiful, subtle, original and informed. The old Matt is nowhere to be seen. The new Matt has arrived at something marvellous.
At the Vigo, they are showing a dozen new paintings, all of which appear to be based on a strict grid. Working on square canvases, subdivided into rows, then subdivided again into squares, then into triangles, the two-in-one artists create pictures that ought to feel mathematical, rigid, cold. But they don’t. Instead, they are full of light, buoyant and bottomlessly interesting.