Portraits prove Byrne’s stern muse still burns brightly

The Rendezvous Gallery is a stalwart of the northeast art scene. Now celebrating its 43rd year, it has seen lesser ventures come and go and has weathered the economic storms that some of its rivals did not survive.

Run by the charming and idiosyncratic American Duane Mead, the gallery doubles as a space for selling chic, vintage Scandinavian glass and tableware, as well as furniture and jewellery.

In the wrong hands, the combination of visual art with this kind of material would create a clash of clutter, but Mead somehow manages to pull it off. So the work of John Byrne, which is dotted hither and thither on the walls among all manner of charming objects, somehow works.

Byrne is a prodigious and gifted polymath. Here, he has worked intensely over a few short weeks to produce about 30 works, most of which might be grouped around the general label of portraiture.

Byrne describes himself as a channel for his own subconscious. He looks at himself, sternly, quizzically, with good humour, asking for answers about identity or meaning.

His work is stylised and mostly readily attributable. In his self-portraiture, the face is elongated with an oversized nose and characteristic beard and moustache. Mostly, he smokes, the cigarette a fitting prop or leitmotif.

There’s also a series of quasi-portraits of African-American men in defiant poses, gesturing, full of character but on the whole, free of menace. These are empathetic works in which the artist identifies with his imaginary subjects — a point emphasised by the fag placed jauntily between their lips. These works look back to the complex, powerful, large-scale paintings of Byrne’s early career — National Velvet (1975) and Kingarocknroll (1973).

Mead has long had a policy of showing up-and-coming artists alongside more established names. So here we find the work of a talented young artist, Hugh Morton, who has just graduated from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.

Morton paints his subjects from awkward perspectives, looking down and across his field of vision, almost as if he were watching the characters in a stage play from high above the curtains and lights.

Morton shows us a figure lying in bed, in contemplation, or a group of soldiers, or figures sitting on a tarpaulin. These are painted almost in a faux naive style, which makes a nice link with Byrne who once posed as the naive artist “Patrick” to break into the London art market.

Most of Byrne’s works have sold but Morton’s are still available. They’re a good investment, culturally and financially.

Until December 22