David Batchelor: 2D3D

David Batchelor is the colour guy. While other artists are busy making work about politics or pop culture, Batchelor’s work has always been primarily about colour: pure colour, not in some ethereal, rarefied sense, but in the material forms that colour finds itself in everyday life – household paint, back-illuminated signage, coloured plastic bottles and other objects. So Batchelor’s work is an odd take on politics, art and pop culture – about the aesthetic value of ordinary, mass-produced stuff, and how the old modernist, ‘high art’ dream of pure colour never really escapes the pop-pleasures of the objects of the industrial world.

Batchelor’s show is titled ‘2D3D’. The paintings (if that’s what they are) are little more than oval pools of brightly coloured gloss paints poured on sheet-aluminium, positioned above a horizontal band of matte black paint. Each one teases you to see the blob and the band as some slightly daft egg-shaped abstract sculpture, sat atop a plinth. The coloured paint has rucked and wrinkled in drying, producing buzzing, zigzag tessellations that mess with your eyes and seem to give the ovals bit of shape and depth. 2-D to 3-D, and back again, see?

Batchelor’s fiddling between painting and sculpture, representation and materiality is a sarcastic, playful reworking of the big paradox that abstract painting once tore itself up over – the point at which pure, optical colour got so pure that it suddenly turned itself into a coloured object, not an abstract painting. His fascination with this problem has always made his work seem slightly out of step, yet his insistence that the thing-ness of everyday colour challenges the tasteful purity of gallery art has always given it a critical edge. But here things are more effete, the colours are like swatches for designer kitchen units, the aluminium and gloss almost goading you to see them as parodies of tasteful contemporary art. Maybe that’s secretly the point – high art has become little more than high-end pop culture. Whether Batchelor is really sending this up, or merely moving with the times, is harder to guess.