So much of it comes down to judgements and decisions. Lady Cosgrove, the first female judge in Scotland [Lover] and Paddy Joe Hill: the judge and the (mis)judged: These are among Michael Fullerton's subjects, his pictorial decisions. Decisions, he acknowledges, involve a political choice. They may involve affirmation or negation, positivity or negativity, the compulsion of proof or the power of persuasion. Decisions also involve the interpretation of signs. The pro-life campaigner [Wayne Allard] cannot directly perceive the life he wishes to protect, only its secondary, codified signs [Billboard: Analogue version of a Pro-Life Action League billboard in Denver, Colorado, 2002]. This is the territory of Fullerton's investigation; the problematics of judgement, the unreliable status of evidence, the subtle motives behind decisions. When is a painting finished, an image complete, its work concluded? Three figures pose artfully in a sylvan glade [Fruits of Passion]. Correction: a fourth gradually emerges behind them, faded into feathered brush strokes, always there but only just. Is this figure absent or present; is he to be considered or ignored? Is he a mistake (a sign of technical incompetence) or does his ghostly appearance tell us more about the limits of representational truth? The image of a snarling dog protecting its bone from an unseen threat: the same image painted on three separate but joined canvases [Dog]. Why? Working clockwise from the top, each of these paintings contains more information, more pigment, a greater sense of completion than the previous. But at what point does this additional information become redundant? Does each of these images relate differently to truth, knowledge and meaning? Fullerton frequently cites Gainsborough because of the latter's ability to transform a political negative (the British class system) into an aesthetic affirmative (seductive, persuasive images). And - great historical irony - he is unfashionable: he has to be worked against as well as with. Nothing is straightforward and easily given here. Love is a bruise [Love Bite], female masturbation is a double negative represented by "analogues containing nothing but blank, empty space", one hollow to penetrate another [Cast Dildos]. Recurring throughou tthese meditations on doubt and uncertainty, however, are the motley representatives of a surviving spirit of commitment and affirmation; the punk's, the hippie, the lover, the spy, the artist.

John Calcutt 2003.