Fewe, Lübbe, Mehm, Moeder: the syllables are like murmurs. And just like Beckett's Krapp, Clov, Hamm and Watt, the names have a primitive ring. But these are paintings, not characters from a novel or a play. And even though their upright rectangular proportions recall domestic portraiture, there is no one there. Naming a painting is the last thing Tomma Abts does, and she takes them from a German dictionary of regional first names. This is more than a conceit.
Naming these paintings compounds the feeling that they are somehow unknowable, and not to be easily dismissed. They look back at you, much as a character might; staring you down and dragging you in, to enmesh you in their inner complications. What strange paintings they are - uncanny and disquieting, even though quietness is a large part of their appeal. You want to have some sort of human relationship with them. Yet so restrained, impersonal and inexpressive is the artist's touch, that their author might as well be absent, too. Abts' paintings are full of paradox, uncertainty, flaws and personality, which might amount to the same thing.
But they also wake you up, sharpening your perceptions, making you alert to composition and contradiction, to their spatial anomalies. Again, like characters, they are filled with deception. You might think of them as snares or traps. One glimpses things hidden just under the surface, traces of things buried under the skin.
Abts has lived in London since 1995. She is in the current British Art Show, and took part in the prestigious Carnegie International in Pittsburgh last year. She has shown at the ultra-cult Wrong Gallery in New York (it occupies nothing more than a Manhattan doorway), and at the Kunsthalle in Basel. Last week, she opened a new exhibition at Greengrassi, an unexpectedly generous, barn-like space tucked away in a south London backstreet.
Abts' paintings are small and muted. They look like they ought to belong to an earlier form of modern art, such as neo-plasticism, or to a movement in European modernism that never existed: one of those last-gasp appeals to utopian idealism, coming after cubism, futurism and constructivism, some sort of abstraction about to be nudged aside by surrealism. Even their colour looks a bit old and dimmed, as though one were looking at some of her paintings under a low-wattage light. Such colour gives me a slight sense of synaesthesia, as if one might smell its age, or its shrillness might induce a feeling of queasiness.
Circles, triangles, dynamic rhomboids and compound, curvilinear forms predominate. There's often a collision between aesthetic cleanliness and clarity, and a sort of overwrought ornamentation, like a pattern on a prewar scrap of wrapping paper, or old abstract wallpaper. There are shadows where shadows shouldn't exist, highlights where none ought to appear, fault-lines like decorative metal inlays, 20th-century geometries modelled like early renaissance drapery. Frankly, they're weird, and sometimes almost unpleasantly mesmerising.
This, you might think, looks like a recherche, minor sort of painting, one that happens on the margins, at a tangent to the main event. This, after all, is 2005. This untimeliness, the uncanniness and homelessness of Abts' paintings, is important. So, too, is their apparent artificiality, the feeling that their authorship is a kind of construction. I felt something similar when I first saw the work of Raoul De Keyser. And as with De Keyser, I like the fact that Abts' paintings are unplaceable - fitting neither into a movement nor a recognisable historical moment. Where do they belong, one asks, and what's with this pedantic need to categorise them? Abts has said that what really excites her is the idea of work so unplaceable that it might point to the "art of the future". Who knows what the art of the future will be? People who try too hard to make art that belongs to the moment have already missed the bus. Go your own way; do something else.
Which is precisely what Abts has done. Her paintings are just big enough to command a presence on the wall, yet small enough to make you want to get up close. Once there, the eye slides and the mind stumbles around in the effort to grasp what it registers. The longer one looks, the more their quietness comes over as a sort of furtiveness, a kind of dissimulation. The smallest details carry weight, as does the colour, or the lack of it, or the mutedness of it. What at first sight seems a readable, reasonable, comprehensible compositional logic turns out to be irrational, subjective and arbitrary. It is as if to say: you can begin a painting anywhere, and where it ends will be somewhere else; something happens along the way.
In fact, many things probably happen along the way, as the paintings take on a life of their own. The artist becomes the painting's accomplice. These paintings can take months. The colour shifts, forms change, things get buried, but nothing is abandoned. How can we tell whether the process of painting and repainting, the alteration of forms, colour and pictorial organisation as she goes, is not so much a matter of working towards a resolution, as just painting pictures on top of other pictures on the same canvas? You can feel it, when you look: these paintings are the result of one extended, unwavering journey.
Abts makes these paintings with the canvas not at an easel or hung on the wall, but with canvas laid flat on its back on the studio worktable. While she is working, she sees them from above. Psychologically, this seems important. I imagine her looking over them much as a writer pores over the blank sheet of paper on a desk, or as a general studies a map. This is more than a simple matter of orientation; as with the scale of the paintings, it infers a kind of intimacy with the object. Mondrian and Pollock worked with their canvases laid flat, and much has been made of this distinction. Looking at Abts' paintings, one sometimes feels that one is also looking down on their shallow planes, wheeling above them, endlessly circling. The planes below shear off one another, sliding away or tilting over and under one another, or rear up above the flatness of the surface towards one, as though one might reach down and unpick them.
Whenever you think the painting is giving you something concrete, it takes it back, reverses itself, turns itself inside out, in a sort of constant flux and reflux of certainty and doubt. Painters are always going over old ground, even when they're not aware of it. Whatever a painter does leads in several directions at once: backwards, forwards, sideways. Is that the central metaphor here?
Sometimes in Abts' paintings the layered planes fan out like a hand of unreadable cards; one has no idea how to play them, or even what the game is. What is in the deck? The abstract and the representational, the figurative and non-figurative, the serious and the stupid. It is a difficult game, and easy to screw up. You have to concentrate, and take things seriously. But never forget that players who take themselves too seriously and give themselves airs are not infrequently those who make the biggest fools of themselves, and make the most stupid paintings. Abts plays quietly, poker-faced, giving nothing away. Such players stay in the game the longest. They are fixating to watch, even if it is hard to follow their game
· Tomma Abts is at Greengrassi, London SE11, until January 14. Details: 020-7840 9101
