My inclination, in writing about The disappearing act, is to extrapolate narrative links in the spaces between works. This is in part because of the visual language of Taylor’s work, which feels more indebted to drawing – a stylistic lineage deeply entangled with the written word and storytelling – than painting. The titles, too, function not simply as paratextual addenda to the images, but rather as parallel texts in their own right. This narrative quality also motions toward photography and film, calling to mind Chris Marker’s Sans soleil with its voice-over; the saturated melodrama (and humour) of Almodovar; holiday photo albums; passport snapshots; the campy silliness of ‘50s advertisements; the blue wash of cyanotype prints. A fragmented travel narrative begins to unfold through gouache and text. The disappearing act is a vacation, an escape; Taylor’s styled and stylised characters its ensemble cast.

All of the people in Taylor’s paintings are imagined. He writes, “it’s never about likeness or identity in a direct sense. I think of them more as stand-ins for a certain feeling, personality, or atmosphere I want to explore.” A series of portraits, cropped close below the neck, depict variations on an archetypal beautiful young man: Rendered in unfussy, confident strokes against canvases primed in fleshy peach, beige and brown tones, their expressions echo the awkward, posed neutrality of ID photos (or models’ comp cards): “they reflect a kind of gaze. The expressions often suggest a shyness, uncertainty, or self-awareness, and that tension feels important. It raises questions about how these men are looked at – sometimes as other, sometimes as idealised, sometimes just as themselves.” Some of the titles of these portraits, like Lanky and The boy made of glass are quite descriptive. Others, such as North star, Motherlander, and Anything goes, are more oblique, signalling attributes beyond the physical: behavioural tendencies, relationships and political attitudes. These portraits are not serious-minded life studies, as they depict no-one in particular. Instead, they’re explorations of a kind of queer male ur-face, a “surface or container”, character sketches exploring different micro-expressions, gestures, postures, ways of being in the world. “That’s where the portrait lives,” Taylor comments, “not in confirming identity, but in complicating it.”

The weekenders reads as the next chapter in the travelogue. A group of three characters appears to be hiking. A masculine figure stands contrapposto, facing away from us, a backpack slung over his shoulder, while two epicene characters gaze, their expressions serious and confrontational, toward the viewer. There is a staged quality to this scene, like a fashion photography approximation of holiday snaps. Pickled fiction, depicting a single figure dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, round sunglasses and a cream-coloured military-style jacket complete with golden epaulattes, feels distinctly editorial. Taylor’s emphasis on the styling of his characters calls to mind Susan Sontag’s definition of camp – that slippery hallmark of so much queer art – as that which revels in “artifice and exaggeration”.

The magic touch, Deep cleanse and A brush with romance evoke these principles of camp through their compositional reference to 1950s advertisements: images of impossibly glamorous and cheerful housewives scrubbing dishes, vacuuming, or otherwise holding up the wonder product. In both paintings, however, the visual representations of cleanliness have been reduced down to icons. A showerhead, a feather duster, an elegant foot dangling above a scrubbing brush, a cartoon flower being dusted down, a dark and slender manicured hand with an absurdly large, gleaming diamond ring – these objects, alongside the sloganistic titles, produce a shorthand that joyfully partakes in and subverts commercial language all at once. The flower and the snail that feature in Deep cleanse are wry inferences to the actual materiality of cleansing products – extracts from the natural world that are denatured to the point of unrecognisability. The snail, here, seems bemused by its own inclusion in the image, exiting the frame via the lower-right corner (but slowly, slowly).

Deep cleanse and The magic touch, as well as Wait for tomorrow, are all rendered entirely in monochromatic blue, their lack of colour variation foregrounding Taylor’s sensitivity with tone and line. In the latter two paintings especially, the blue washes give the scenes (notably empty of people) an atmosphere of melancholy and stillness, which sits in contrast to the playfulness of Taylor’s other works on the show. Here, the title of the exhibition also takes on a different character, not so much an act of theatre or magic, but one of quiet retreat. Wait for tomorrow feels like one of the in-between moments of a coastal holiday captured in suspended time – perhaps the other side of Taylor’s young men’s resolute gazes.

Blue, Michael Taylor writes, is a colour that reflects and invites reflection in turn, evoking the relationship between sea and sky; artist and subject. Blue pigment – especially indigo, sometimes referred to as blue gold, the shade in which these paintings were made – has a singular role in art history, having been reserved at one point for only the holiest of subjects (the Virgin Mary’s gown, for example) due to its rarity and costliness. Using such a regal pigment to render objects as mundane as snails and feather dusters cheekily elevates them. Like the juxtaposition of the objects itself, it is a gesture of equivalence. In the world of Taylor’s paintings, nothing is more or less valuable than anything else: a moment of stillness, with its incrementally shifting shadows, is just as worthy a subject as glamorous fictional characters, and the showerhead sparkles just as brightly as the diamond.”

(Text by Max Law)