EXHIBITIONS / Cruisin' for a bruisin' in Brum

A NINETIES painting? Long overdue, surely. The art world as much as any other, and much more than many, is attached to the question 'whither?'. And the IKON gallery's current group show proposes an answer. The title of the show is Bruise: Painting for the Nineties, and the proposal is that if the Eighties saw a revival of figurative painting, what we are seeing now is a revival of abstraction. It may sound like an answer that anyone could have devised on a wet afternoon, but it is not a complete fiction. There is a faint quickening of this particular pulse, and IKON has put a finger on it.

For many years abstract painting has laboured under a bad name, either because it had come to look like mere shape-making, or because it bore the marks of an aggressive, over-assertive hand (see Abstract Expressionism, villainisation thereof). The six Bruise artists, in their 30s mostly, have a way of doing abstract or abstractish pictures that avoids both decoration and aggression, and also fits nicely into a contemporary sensibility.

The tendency is to make paintings that seem almost to have painted themselves - whose results look like they have occurred on the canvas rather than been applied there. In Nicholas May's pictures, this is more or less the truth. May works with controlled pourings and minglings of blacks and golds, no brush intruding. It's an opulent version of the sort of patterns that a perspex executive toy, filled with slow-winding, viscous fluids might produce. And with deep ultramarine grounds, like those used to create 3-D illusions in psychedelic posters, the pigments really do float. In her elegant entwinings of wrought-iron/intestinal forms, Mikey Cuddihy's handiwork is disguised too: so much of the paint has been scraped away that the look is more of an imprint. And this feeling of residue is left also in Estelle Thompson's fragile little icons of twigs and sprouts, intensely coloured but only just there.

These are attractive pictures, with domestic possibilities, which are surely not lost on their purchasers. They would furnish a spacious apartment in a pleasing and unobtrusive way. One needs to emphasise this because, though it is obvious, it is not quite the exhibition's agenda (I refer to its explanatory texts). Attractiveness won't do. The sensibility requires - not actual rebarbativeness, that is vieu jeu - but a faint whiff of danger. Bruise: the paint surface as a damaged, discoloured skin. The sensibility in question arose some years back, and more in photographic work than in painting - in luscious pictures of inner organs and bodily fluids by such as Helen Chadwick and Andres Serrano. Sometimes it shades into ambiguous artistic responses to HIV, with its fearsome reprise of the romantic love/death duet. The great thing is to set up a tension between attraction and repulsion, the elegant and the unwholesome, beauty and sickness.

The paintings do supply this, just. Roger Kite's gloomy fields of colour are distinctly blood-shot, veined with seeping reds. Joseph Mark Wright's metallic washes glaze over what may be the bacterial breeding grounds of a Petri dish. And one could see a sexual or decomposing gooeyness in May's pictures, a hint of abrasion or sourness or decay in Cuddihy and Thompson. But in Bruise, the balance is all for pleasure. This work would be disquieting only to those who live the very quietest of lives.

Besides, if we are to celebrate a marriage of beauty and sickness, the pair are hardly newlyweds. In mood, though not in look, this might equally be painting for the 1890s. It breathes the sweet-sick air of that quintessential Nineties figure invented by Max Beerbohm, Enoch Soames - a poet manque and maudit, who describes his forthcoming slim volume as evoking 'strange growths, natural and wild; yet exquisite, and many-hued, and full of poisons'. The volume, when it finally appears, bears the title Fungoids. Not a bad name for an exhibition either.

'Bruise': IKON Gallery, John Bright St, Birmingham (021-643 0708), till 1 Aug.

(Photograph omitted)