Mr Jago: NIL

Mr Jago has been around the British scene long enough to count as a veteran, and long enough to be tired of the category he usually gets filed under. Now based in Bristol, he is regularly called a street artist, though the work has long since outgrown the back streets and belongs more naturally on gallery walls. His new exhibition, NIL, opens at Unit London on Thursday 22 October 2015.

The paintings in it are a long way from where he began. His early reputation rested on character illustration, above all a population of robotic figures. The current work, in acrylic and now oil, is abstract and densely layered, and deals with large subjects: the environmental damage done by the human species, warfare, climate change and politics. Looked at quickly the canvases can seem random. Given time, a considered point of view comes through.

The meaning of nothing

Jago explained the title first. Nil can mark either a start or an end, and the show is built around a tension he says runs through most of his work, a fight between heavy pessimism and high optimism. Human evolution and technology have produced remarkable things, but a great deal about the direction the species is heading looks ugly to him. He does not think humanity has looked after the planet well, or treated itself kindly. The paintings show both possibilities, a beginning and an end that may be close, and leave open whether people will overcome nature or overcome what is destroying it.

From robots to abstraction

As a child he filled sketchbooks, obsessed with comics and early graffiti characters, and learned by copying other people before he had a style of his own. He went to university to study illustration hoping to find that style, and was told by his tutors that commercial success came from copying convincingly and doing what the client asked. He ignored the lesson, kept experimenting and had some commercial success during and just after his studies. As his drawing loosened he moved into paint.

The shift from illustrator to painter saw the robots swallowed up by abstract surroundings. In one sense that was symbolic, the abstraction standing for the same tension NIL is about. In another it was just where experiment led, towards a freer and more spontaneous way of working. People still ask if the robots will return, and his answer is that anyone who looks closely will find them there already.

Moving into oils

NIL is a transitional show. Some canvases are entirely oil, others mix oil with acrylic, and some are acrylic and spray paint only. He likes the texture and range of pigment that oils bring. They are slower and more deliberate to work with, but he expects his handling to loosen as he gets more fluent, as it did when he moved from illustration to painting. He also noted, with some relief, that his studio smells much better than it did in the aerosol years, and that his collection of palette knives is growing.

Just a painter

Asked about being boxed in as a street, urban or graffiti artist, he said none of those describes him or what he makes. He is far happier with “painter”.

On whether the work reflects society, he hopes its themes are relevant, and hopes even more that others share its worries about the vices of the modern world and its delight in the beauty of nature. He rejects the old charge that abstract art is bourgeois. To him abstraction is the most accessible kind of picture there is, because it lets one viewer see humanity conquering nature while another sees nature winning. Both readings are available, and the viewer decides between beauty and despair.

He does have a taste for the ridiculous, not obvious from the paintings. He said it tends to come out in the pub, in his dreams or in freestyling, and that the pub is often involved in the other two as well.