Pollard deploys the argot in its original sense of a ‘thieves code’ to frame the ‘appropriational’ traditions of post-modernist (and historical) painting, whilst compiling densely enigmatic visual symbols redolent of an underworld polari. His working-method is phoenix -like, reducing his chosen images to an ‘abstract language’ and then reforming them as dissolute fictions. In the past, his ‘argots’ have included Robin Hood, the tools and artefacts of studio practice and the fashion-world-alchemy of Ruby and Millie and Revlon. His analytical process of reproduction is undercut by a metaphorical form of sabotage, notably in a series of works in which he twists his source-material under a photo-copier as means of generating home-made vortices. The delicate conventions of miniaturist painting are then combined with processes of accident and spillage associated with free-form abstraction. The results are often quite marvellous. The leaky crystalline images have the appearance of – to quote Ovid in Metamorphoses – ‘bodies changing into other bodies’, of solid objects warping and melting.

Through this eerie distorting lens, captured stories change into other stories: Richard Dadd-inspired figures of 19th century youths become Dickensien pick-pockets and vagabonds; lipstick and eye-line canisters amass to form the heads of Dada-esque clowns leering and grimacing in the dark. This defiantly fantastic quality - what Pollard describes as a flight in the face of ‘utter blandness’ - leads to works that are as rich in their imaginative possibilities as they are pointed in their critiques of contemporary cultural ennui. But a highly detailed and ironic sense of structure allows the works to embody a Romanticism which is edgy and scabrous rather than flabby or sentimental. Their quixotic aspects are routinely anchored to subjects that are narcissistic, mercenary even illicit in their connotations.

Laurence Figgis