Michael Miller's art unites mastery, mystery, simplicity, and contradiction. His

methodical working process combines intense deliberation and experimentation,

obsessive craft, cycles of revision and repetition, and decisive shifts of direction.

Miller's works are connected by an underlying autobiographical thread, reflecting

his personal experiences of growing up in Glasgow during the decline of the city's

shipyards and heavy industry. His use of ship imagery references his father's service

in the merchant navy while they are very contemporary in the themes they explore

reflecting on the wider political turmoil of our times. Ultimately, these are mirrors of

Miller's inner world and his unique preoccupations and concerns.

On one level, the paintings surely emphasize the densely woven continuities that

have governed Miller's development, and reaffirm his consistent practice of making

new art while progressing through a chain of variant self-repetitions whose play of

recurrence and reconsideration is analogue, in the manner of Proustian memory, for

the fullness of consciousness itself. Yet our sampling makes us equally aware of the

many sharp fissures and discontinuities in this same artistic evolution. Thinking

about how we might articulate a meaning for these paintings inevitably draws us

then into broader questions of how, on the occasion of an exhibition, we should

reckon with issues of coherence and "legibility" in an art so densely armored and

internally complex — how legitimately we might try to put so many disparate pieces

and phases together, to balance their often seemingly contradictory demands, and to

look through them to understand the body of work and the career whose history we

see embedded there.

Where and how should we begin to say what such an art means?

We could begin at a basic level, with the impact the art has on us before we label our

pleasures or organize our questions — the particular blend of stimulations,

irritations, and rewards that we sense as a personality or character in the presence of

these paintings with their yes-no rhythms of fast and slow, thick and thin, liquidity

and dryness, intimacy and implacable chilliness, the literal and the inexplicable in

fusion.The deliberate use of the paint itself reveals weathering and corrosion,

emphasizing the nautical origins of disruptive dazzle schemes. Lines, marks, and 

other compositional elements are occasionally left visible in an apparent gesture of

"truthfulness," but in many cases, these nuances are fakes, introduced to undercut

any suggestion of pictorial integrity. Miller’s solicitation of touch in his

paintings—his enfleshment of abstraction—has political ramifications that are in

dialogue with latest historical events and are made manifest in the way the works

look as well as in how they were made. At various times he has been the wielder of

a cool, smoothly anonymous touch, and at others the author of some of the densest

and most caressed surfaces in contemporary painting; in turn a master in the use of

colors and textures that creates a weathered effect that evokes sun-bleaching and

corrosion, in keeping with the maritime origins of dazzle camouflage. Miller's use of

color, line, and form creates a layered and thought-provoking visual language that

speaks to the complexities of the human experience.

The paintings can be interpreted in a variety of ways, from playful to introspective,

and Miller's reference to his father's connection to the merchant navy adds depth

and meaning to the work. The series invites viewers to consider the ways in which

our experiences shape our perception of reality, and how our understanding of truth

can be influenced by societal and cultural forces.