Is Lumsden a Zombie Formalist? No, but it’s puzzling why he hasn’t attracted the attentions of someone like a Stefan Simchowitz (notorious Los Angeles patron of ZF). The ZF template is really someone like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Israel Lund or Jacob Kassay – much more stripped down, more austere but with a kind of technical indifference or detachment that registers as false or faux grit (could pretty much sum up American art in the 21st century). Lumsden probably seems too crafty with his infinite and intricate glazings, too lush with his super-saturated blues and purples, too romantic in a fairly straightforward, non-theoretical way. But on the other hand, he works mostly around easel scale (a key indicator), the work has a distinctly technical and photographic quality (could almost be the products of Photoshop or science imaging) almost certainly derives from Richter at some point and composition for some time has been seriously serial. The guy ought to be a candidate. But these things are never straightforward, there’s always a certain amount of art world politics involved.
He’s an Edinburgh-based painter, around 51 years old and from what I can see on the CV didn’t attend art school, or none worth mentioning, no college group shows to speak of. This too, has to be a good thing. It might explain why the work has such a direct and diligent approach, why it might seem a bit romantic or uncool by London post-grad standards. The derivation from Richter too could be a sticking point, but Lumsden is now some distance from the drag-and-blur meister, largely through drawing. Shapes may start out being squeegee’d into place or generating vacancies or irregularities to the picture surface but Lumsden nurtures these into something else, vaguely volumes, vaguely patterns, vaguely in or out of focus, often sinking into a monochrome abyss. Sometimes they look like medical scans or molecular modelling and this to some extent explains and abets the somewhat shrill, synthetic-feeling palette. The work is dealing in realms we readily consign to the abstract by their exoticism or obscurity, but they have their rules, their lenses and events. The artist in statements acknowledges a sense of motion in places attributed to the blurring, as does Richter. But unlike Richter, the sense is not of massive erasure or concealment but here to counterpoint more static or sharper focussed shapes, to create differences or relations within the objects and setting. Sometimes the blurring models or grades an object with tone, sometimes it places it out of focus and sometimes it places it in motion.
This makes it seem much less abstract of course, at least by Minimalist or absolutist standards, but what is being abstracted is really the kind of screen-based imagery we think of starting from photography and x-rays and has grown exponentially with the digital era. More advanced or arcane realms may seem quite arbitrary in their rules, but as we track them slowly back to more familiar and realistic realms, it is hard to spot where nature ends and culture begins. For all Lumsden’s patient craft, this seems to me what makes his abstraction new and interesting.
