By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 29/8/07

A number of painters used to be able to be relied upon to remind us of our own mortality. Through their behaviour and art there was the presence of hungry, fired-up eyes. Drug and alcohol-inspired slashing and congealing of paint to the canvas provided a kind of alternate physical body to inflict pain and decay upon. There was the sense that, in some misguided heroic fight to the end, art was worth more than life itself.

Image: Painting or Death (detail), Ewan McDougallBy Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post 29/8/07

A number of painters used to be able to be relied upon to remind us of our own mortality. Through their behaviour and art there was the presence of hungry, fired-up eyes. Drug and alcohol-inspired slashing and congealing of paint to the canvas provided a kind of alternate physical body to inflict pain and decay upon. There was the sense that, in some misguided heroic fight to the end, art was worth more than life itself.

Image: Painting or Death (detail), Ewan McDougallThe days of such a stereotype are well and truly over - most contemporary artists are far more engaged with the world beyond them. And then there's Dunedin painter Ewan McDougall. He plays the expressionist outsider to the hilt, yet he does so with abundant, farcical glee. Ludicrously bright, his are the sticky colours of the confectioner as clown at a party where excess has turned into sickness. Excessively raw, the laughing eyes of his stick figures with their demonic gleam begin to drip and droop.

The Rolling Stones were playing as I entered Fisher Gallery, and the canvases are full of scenes that mark a party from the '70s at that awry late point when things start to slide from joyful to unpleasant. Likewise, it's as if he knows the old art party is over, but drawing from its energy he's going to milk the remains. "Well, it's not art brut," he scrawls in one work, and there's the sense that while he owes much to the work of the last century he couldn't give a fig. In Drifting in St.Clair, with art piratical glee, he sets his revelers adrift in a flimsy vessel on crocodile-filled seas. A dog barks out "Where Th" above the title of the ship 'Fukawi'.

Works depict outlaw years of partying and unhealthy excess

There's biography here. McDougall draws from sickness in his past and happiness in his present. These works are full of scenes that evoke what he describes as his outlaw years of partying and unhealthy excess around the world, and yet their twisted humour provides a celebration of life that marks how now, in his later years, painting is his addiction.

McDougall's work has drawn from the same well for many years now, constantly piling on top of itself. This excess can be overpowering - as dulling as alcohol - and this exhibition itself is a little over-stuffed and mixed in its success (you can see a wider example of his work on his website). Yet I admire the way McDougall continues to go at it, boxing with himself in the same corner, with sometimes exhilarating results.

Mixed results an expression of life

In his celebration of the intuitive he in fact seems to revel in the mixed result as an expression of life. While some compositions are full of seasick, sinuous waves of joy or anxious angular aggression, at other times their crowd of layered elements topple, like the stacks of figures he sometimes depicts, into confusion.

For every work here that feels like a rock riff on a too familiar theme, there's another that shows he's also always pushing his painting into new territory. He's always capable of surprising. With each panel in the triptych Drinking with Ensor he piles the same juicy colours into writhing, gleaming swirls of abstraction through which faces glower out. With Bat Outta Hell globby red impish beasties leer from the face of a painted cricket bat, goading you to prise it off the wall and banish them for good.

McDougall reminds us of our own mortality

The exhibition title Painting or Death is as much rock'n'roll parody as a statement of intent. For McDougall personally, painting has been one of his saviours, and his works do seek to remind us of our mortality. In the painting of the same title the words 'memento mori' appear on a John Reynolds-like signpost (the Latin phrase meaning 'remember that you are mortal' that marks an art genre). The work is full of signs of flying in the face of death. Figures fling themselves Icarus-like into the sky, volcanoes erupt, and the central figure haemorrhages pink goo while another administers a syringe of paint. But even here the skeletons wear party hats.

Painting or Death, Ewan McDougall, Fisher Galleries, until 7 September