There is nothing like moving house to remind you of the stubbornness of objects. From the fridge to the bed to the table, all the things that usually help you through the day suddenly turn into sullen obstacles. What I hadn’t expected to come up against, when my family and I recently moved to a new city, was the weight and stubbornness of paper.

 

After all, a piece of paper is nothing much – so light it’s barely there. The fact that paper weighs so little must be one of the reasons why I hadn’t thrown any of it out for almost a decade. As the staff at the check-in counter say when your luggage tips the scales, it’s always paper that puts you over the limit. And, on moving day, there all my paper was – piece after piece of it, deposited over the years into whichever cardboard box was nearest. Payslips, ticket stubs, fridge-door farewells, every comic I had bought as a kid, every drawing made by my own kids, a diary that never made it past 18 January, articles torn from magazines for future reading, and, above all, the notes to self and middle-of-the-night memorandums that seemed absolutely important at the time, but which had drifted slowly deeper in the reef of stuff.

 

One threat these boxes posed was backache; the other was to my time. I couldn’t go near them without drifting into a kind of appalled reverie, standing there wondering what on earth I meant when I scribbled ‘utopian slumps’ on the back of an envelope. Even more dangerous was the temptation to ‘sort it all out’, to go through these fragments and try to compress them into some more respectable form – the filing cabinet to end all filing cabinets. But there simply wasn’t time. And besides, after several doomed attempts to thin out the piles, I began to like these bulging boxes of scraps. Instead of regarding them as the slightly shameful evidence of thoughts not yet processed, I began to think of them as stubbornly satisfying objects – evidence, albeit sometimes impossible to decipher, that something actually happened. So much of life just blows right past us, a flutter of thoughts, small events and conversations. I now take a perverse pleasure in the fact that pieces of paper have ended up marking time so weightily.

 

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The first time I saw a large group of Ricky Swallow’s watercolours, they were not lined up in a row on a gallery wall, but taken out one by one from a box. There were studies of museum displays, vaporous monkeys, extinct animals, and drifting underwater scenarios, but what I remember as vividly as the subjects of these paintings was the physical presence of the paintings themselves. In fact, the word ‘painting’ seems too grand and solid for works so quiet in tone and light in touch. Some were still in sketchbooks, some had clearly come from them, and many of them had soaked up so much liquid colour that their surfaces were wrinkled and puckered. Looking at Swallow’s aquatic images, full of bathyspheres and undersea creatures, it was easy to imagine the pages having come from the long-lost diary of a deep-ocean explorer. Indeed, their surfaces were so fluid – so full of runs, backwashes, blooms and drifts of colour – it seemed that the whole box-load might itself have been retrieved from the ocean.

 

Since then I’ve seen Swallow’s watercolours in dealer galleries, public galleries, art fairs, and in catalogues like this one. Each time, though, I go back in memory to that first out-of-the-box encounter, and the way the works felt like something accidentally discovered rather than officially presented to the world. While I’m glad that Swallow’s watercolours are now finding their way, framed and insured, into this substantial survey exhibition, that shouldn’t stop us from noticing that these works remain committedly casual, made in the downtime weeks between Swallow’s labour-intensive wood carvings, and rendered with an atmospheric looseness that often surprises those who know only his sculptures. As always when watercolours find their way to large institutional walls, the challenge is to honour their casual and modest qualities, rather than anxiously explain them away. Instead of dragging Swallow’s watercolours to centre stage and loudly proclaiming them neglected, better to follow them out to the edges of his practice, and notice how they make their modesty meaningful.

 

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You might expect watercolour’s inbuilt modesty to make artists stay away. How is anyone going to claim attention in a format so retiring and quiet? In fact, the opposite is the case. Over the last 10 or so years, watercolour has enjoyed a quiet renaissance in the hands of artists looking for an alternative to big gallery spaces and the big art that predictably fills them. For Swallow, the very things that give watercolour such a marginal, trembling place in the public gallery hierarchy are at the heart of its appeal. Instead of delivering a museum-sized visual hit, legible from 50 paces and instantly memorable, his watercolours insist that we go to them and attend closely to whatever is emerging from the spills of paint. They’re more like letters sent from one person to another than speeches addressed to a crowd.

 

How do the watercolours relate, then, to Swallow’s hard-won wooden sculptures, which update the themes and objects of seventeenth-century vanitas for the twenty-first century? Light where the sculptures are heavy, atmospheric where the sculptures are sharp, the watercolours are rendered with a swiftness that could well seem too easy after the demands of chisels and files. But the watercolours also dwell on vanitas themes – on mortality and longevity – and their very softness tells us something useful about how Swallow’s work relates to that tradition. To say that he paints skulls or skeletons is only the beginning of the story. What matters as much as the obvious subjects of the work is the way those subjects are altered and inflected in the telling, the way he seems to be coaxing them out from some blurry place or releasing them back into it.

 

In other words, the watercolours remind us that Swallow’s relation with the vanitas tradition isn’t direct or unquestioning. Rather, it’s hesitant, fluid and wondering. When Swallow floats a skull and dead creatures on the four sheets of All things must pass vol. 1–4, we have no trouble discerning an update on the still life theme; here human death takes its place alongside the deaths of other creatures. But the work doesn’t come at you with the almost taunting moral conviction of a traditional vanitas painting, such as Dutch artist Jan Treck’s Vanitas still life (1648), where the skull dares you to luxuriate in all the surrounding visual glory that cannot be taken beyond the grave. In Swallow’s variation, the skull and its animal companions float on strange flat fields of colour, like things whose place in our world has yet to be determined. The brushwork that describes them seems tender and curious about these objects, rather than settled in its opinions of them.

 

It’s as if Swallow is testing these images, setting them down lightly on paper so he can gauge their current worth. The culture and belief system that produced seventeenth-century still life painting is now mostly gone, or at least vastly changed. Are those symbols and forms still useful to us, or are they simply props and relics past their prime? If they are depleted and redundant, what becomes of the meanings once attached to them? And which forms should we reach for in their place? What Swallow finds in watercolour, I think, is a way to hold on to those forms, but very lightly. To pick them up like a rumour.

 

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The main actors in Swallow’s early watercolours are intelligent and faintly menacing monkeys. They read books, operate laptops, listen through headphones, pilot spaceships towards other worlds, and generally run the show. Swallow records their actions and antics with all the enthusiasm of a field researcher with notebook flipped open: here they are reading books; there they are fondling guns. It’s zoology shaded by comedy, a kind of diary of evolutionary downfall. And like William Hogarth’s many eighteenth-century paintings and engravings featuring preening and puffed-up monkeys, these watercolours are not about monkeys but rather us humans. They are about our flailing and preposterous attempts to make progress, get ahead, extend ourselves in space and time. Whether they are tinkering with gadgets, piloting spacecraft, spraying graffiti on walls, or creating fresh versions of themselves in the lab, Swallow’s monkeys might all be considered surrogate artists, using whatever is at their disposal to reach beyond themselves. The resulting watercolours are science fictions of a comic and wondering kind, gently dwelling on the absurdity of our efforts to make ourselves known in a limitless universe.

 

Leaf through Swallow’s recent watercolours, however, and the monkeys in their sci-fi settings fade completely from view. In their place come human faces and figures of a much more certain vintage. These watercolours are based on photographs – though ‘based’ sounds too solid for what happens in them. It is as if each portrait were placed in the opposite of developing fluid, a substance that softens the certainty of the photographic record and takes it to the edge of dissolution. The face seen close up in When you were gone is almost lost in the pooling pigment. The paired faces in False true lovers look at once stunned and accused by our interest in them. The faces of members of the legendary Kelly Gang are rendered in bruised blacks and blues, and look by turns malevolent (Ned), wretched (James Kelly), and too far gone to care (Hanging Joe Byrne). The same faces receive an unexpected second life in watercolours that portray the outlaw Ned as played by rock star Mick Jagger in the 1970 film Ned Kelly – pop cultural memory bleeding back across colonial history. Of all the faces Swallow portrays, none haunt his watercolours as persistently as those of musicians. From John Fahey and Nick Drake through to the reedy, melancholy figure of ‘Papa John’ Phillips, co-writer of ‘California dreamin’’, musicians form a kind of shadow community within Swallow’s art – half-hip and half-haunted, an unlikely aristocracy of shaggy man-boys, wistful skinnies, and finger-picking daddy-os.

 

Swallow is known to be an obsessive listener, someone whose art is motivated as much by music as by the work of other visual artists. Since moving to Los Angeles he has immersed himself in Californian music of the 1960s and ’70s. On that count, these watercolours might be considered the notes of a fan, Swallow transferring these faces from album covers into the scrapbook of his own enthusiasms. If this is fandom, though, it’s fandom of a peculiar kind, tender and yet thoroughly distanced. In the photos that he selects, the musicians adopt the role of reluctant prophets, modern-day troubadours, staring past or through the camera towards some horizon of possibility. Like Francis Upritchard, Damiano Bertoli and David Noonan, to name just three artists of Swallow’s generation who are also reaching into the archive of this period, Swallow seems obscurely attracted to the mixture of hope and melancholy in these images – the way they sit on the fault line between 1960s idealism and the disenchantments of the 1970s. The closer he goes to these faces, the more puzzling their presence becomes. No longer joined together in hippy solidarity, the faces in The hangman’s beautiful portraits (based on a photograph of an Incredible String Band album cover) turn solemn, strange and old. The musicians in One nation underground seem to pass from currency before our eyes, presented like fragments peeled from a fan’s album, or busts in a museum of antiquities. By turning this period’s pop stars into figments and monuments, Swallow does justice to an odd aspect of memory, which is the way faces and events from the recent past often feel further away from us than those from centuries past. We walk through our lives buoyed by the illusion that the crucial details are right there – that we can reach into the filing cabinet of memory and find just what we need. But, as I discovered when I started digging down into the boxes of paper in my garage, even your self of five or 10 years ago can feel like someone unfamiliar. Thirty-odd years since their heyday, Swallow’s musicians waver on the brink of unfamiliarity. They’re halfway between going and gone.

 

So is Swallow farewelling these figures or bringing them back? Reclaiming them or letting them go? In the end I think the watercolours must be counted as acts of commemoration – modest, indistinct and partial, certainly, but commemorative acts nonetheless. The evidence for this lies in the simple fact that he made them in the first place. Having listened to their music and looked at their photos, he set to work with paper and brush. And what led him to do so, I suspect, was not the looking so much as the listening. Songs bring the past vividly into the present because voices are such intimate things. Push play on a recording and the voice of someone long-gone is right there with you all of a sudden. Little wonder that Edison’s phonograph recordings were once thought to offer the chance to listen in on the dead.

 

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One of the reasons that watercolour is known as a minor medium is its sheer vulnerability. Visit the storerooms of almost any public gallery and you’ll find the oil paintings waiting on racks, robust and ready for viewing. Watercolours, by contrast, are the recluses of the painting world, hiding out in wide, cool, dark drawers or in archival Solander boxes. To see one you have to put on white gloves and lift away a sheet of tissue, an act that always feels to me like something that might happen in a morgue. When such works are released for public viewing, it is for short periods and under lighting so low that they seldom have a chance to shine. The very things that give watercolours their life – their transparency and atmospheric lightness – also make conservators fear for them.

 

But the very things that inspire fear in conservators inspire something different in Swallow. For an artist obsessed with what lasts, what medium could be better than one that is itself troublesomely mortal? One work in particular pushes this tension to a wonderful extreme. A sad but very discreet recollection of beloved things and beloved beings is a sequence of 10 pages devoted to corpses from the burial catacombs of Palermo, Sicily, where bodies rest in underground niches, fully clothed in the fashion of the day and visited regularly by relatives. One of Swallow’s deathliest watercolour sequences, it is also one of his most alive, because the corpses are dressed in clothing of carnival brightness – the kind of high, lively brightness that watercolour especially makes possible.

 

Watercolour is commonly assumed to be the medium best suited to light or minor subjects; some flowers would be suitable, or a dawn light on a hillside. With its band of bright corpses, A sad but very discreet recollection nicely undoes this piece of received wisdom. Here, the lightest of mediums proves to be the perfect vehicle for the heaviest subject of all. For me, this combination of the light and the sombre is what makes Swallow’s paper trail worth following. And this combination also oddly affirms what I discovered in my garage, where all those scraps of paper have taken on an unexpected mass. The watercolours are just pieces of paper, after all – vulnerable, light-shy, easily overlooked. But, following the trail for a while and picking up the pieces, I find myself surprised by the weight.