Look but don't touch unless you're minted

Callum Eaton, 'Look but don't touch' at Carl Kostyál, 18 August - 9 September

To someone accustomed to visiting art galleries, looking at Callum Eaton’s paintings involves a dual procedure. At first sight they are impressive because of the illusions they cast: they look startlingly like the front of vending machines or launderette washing machines or photobooths. Next comes the gap in which you look for that extra something, the ‘conceptual’ bit that takes them from being a display of technical skill (not always valued in contemporary art) to something with a deeper message that opens them to the possibility of critique.

Obviously, critics of painting need to find this second component or we’d spend all our time writing about characteristics like ‘handling’ or ‘touch’, all description and no argument. So what do Eaton’s paintings do beyond playing with our sense of sight? What are they about? Their sleek, clean appearance would seem remote if not for the distinct temporal markers, like the ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ sticker in one of the paintings of a payphone, or the opened vape box perched in the other. This suggests that they are about what it feels like to inhabit a modern British city, specifically London.

Their realer-than-real representation of street furniture and consumer products puts them in the ballpark of Pop Art, and I think the paintings could do what the likes of Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha never quite managed and be genuinely ‘pop’ in the original sense of the word. People who are otherwise alienated by contemporary art might find pleasure in looking at their city, via Eaton, in a way that is both familiar and strikingly new.

The most convincing illusions in the show are produced by the paintings When One Door Opens and Another Door Closes, which represent the shiny metal entrances to a pair of lifts, inviting the onlooker to step in. As well as illusions, they are also the perfect metaphor. Will the lifts take us to the lofty heights of fine art, or descend to crowd-pleasing popularity?

If you hadn’t already guessed, check the digital displays above the lift doors. We’re going down. There are few obstacles that would prevent anyone from engaging with the evocative atmosphere, the fun, and indeed the skill of Eaton’s art. All the better that it does so in a painterly idiom about which there is a great deal of dense, critical writing, concerned specifically with the relationship between the high and the low. That’ll keep the intellectual types happy.

There is one considerable drawback. Few members of the public will see these paintings, as they are tucked away in an upstairs room of Mayfair’s Carl Kostyál gallery, accessible only by buzzer; and any sales, unless a public institution gets hold of one, will presumably be carted straight off to private collections, beyond the reach of vulgar eyes. Clearly, that’s not what they’re meant for.