Blinky Palermo's art - made from scraps of fabric and warped timber - was a mess. And that's what makes it fascinating, says Adrian Searle
Artists need a memorable, resonant name. If you haven't a good one of your own, it's worth inventing or stealing one. How Peter Schwarze became Blinky Palermo is uncertain. Adopted not long after his birth in Leipzig in 1943, Schwarze was registered Peter Heisterkamp. Later, when he was a student under Joseph Beuys at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, facing the perennial question of who or what kind of artist to be, he took the name Blinky Palermo. Perhaps Beuys, himself one of the great self-mythologists of 20th-century art, gave him the moniker. Or perhaps it was a fellow student who rechristened him, recognising that Schwarze bore a resemblance to an infamous Italian-American mobster in the fight game.
Origins are important, even if to be an artist is largely a matter of self-invention. Connections matter, too. One way or another, Blinky the artist got connected. Ends are also important: Palermo died young, in 1977, aged 33, while on holiday in the Maldives. Some biographers suggest he died "in mysterious circumstances"; others say "of heart failure" - though that, too, is as tantalising as it is ambiguous. The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics is the title of a typically blustering painting by Julian Schnabel, which fed the Palermo myth (founded on the idea that Palermo was an "artist's artist") and didn't do Schnabel's reputation any harm either. Fostering the association gave Schnabel a bit of easy gravitas.
Artists always take things from one another: that is how art works and develops. Rumour and gossip are good, too, as smokescreens for the fact that the artistic life is often less eventful than the myth of a riot of creative epiphanies, wild orgies, fist-fights and scams. Art collectors, critics and audiences need a story, a bit of glamour: it boosts the aura of the work and the artist.
Aura, in Palermo's case, might well be seen as a necessary adjunct to his work, which is humorous and devious, but also reticent and spare. Walking into his retrospective at London's Serpentine Gallery is to enter a studious, reflective atmosphere. Colour hums in the low light required for the conservation of his now-fragile works. You have to get up close to see how things have been made - materials, fine distinctions and details are important in Palermo's art.
Things need close inspection and a bit of decoding, and there is lots to pore over and work through, both on the walls and in the vitrines where displays of drawings, plans and photographic documentation of lost projects are laid out. Palermo's art, surprisingly, turns out to be both monkish and funky. His art also appears to run on several parallel paths. There are severe canvases and wobbly wooden things, implacable rectangles and watercolours of undressed women watching TV. There is grey pipe smoke and roaring colour; there are throwaway things and tightly worked-out plans. The conflict between the blob and the straight edge is never resolved.
One might say Palermo didn't live long enough to sort out the conflicts in his art, though perhaps the conflicted is preferable to the smug, sorted, ironed-out art career - one of the major pains in the butt of our time.
Palermo made small, apparently much-worked paintings that turned out to be painted over other people's abandoned canvases. Other, larger works, which appear to be paintings of carefully tuned and modulated fields of abutted colour, are made from bolts of plain-coloured cloth, cut and sewn and stretched up. Leisesprecher II (Speaker in a Low Voice II), in which a rich, red cloth hangs unstretched above a smaller canvas stretched with the same material, is the first thing you see on entering the gallery. It might be seen as setting the timbre of the show.
Most of these "paintings", disconcertingly, have the colour tunings and internal divisions we might associate with Ellsworth Kelly, the late works of Rothko or the early paintings of Brice Marden. But they are just dyed cotton from the haberdashery department. There is no touch, no surface to them except the nub and weave of the cloth itself. Interestingly, among Palermo's early watercolours, there are a number of images of scissors. The idea of the cut, the scrap and the pattern are all important to his art: each contributes to his work's richness, generosity and openness. He also made oddly shaped little wall-bound things from found materials, and larger works from warped bits of timber, studio detritus and coloured tape. He made small triangular paintings designed to sit over doorway lintels or to hang above one's head. There are slightly warped T-shapes of timber painted red, and other shaped and bricolaged pieces incised and marked with paint. These all draw attention to themselves as objects, divide or interrupt the wall in interesting ways and refer to human proportion.
I am unsure that Palermo was ever entirely an "abstract" artist. In one work, bluntly titled Blue Disc and Stick, a tall vertical length of timber and a small wooden disc lean nonchalantly against the wall. Both elements are embalmed in sprightly, blue plastic tape. The two forms can be read as a capital I and a full stop. "Here I am," says the work. It is a declaration of presence, and looks back at you, unnervingly.
Other groups of forms - a little black painted box; a palm-sized ovoid rubbed over with crayon; another rough ovoid with crinkly edges - bear the evidence of having been much touched and worked over, reminding us of the act of handling, grasping, holding. For me, they root Palermo's art in the touch of the hand as well as the work of the mind.
What a restrained poetry Palermo's art was. His was an art with a calm, clear voice, though it often said quite complicated things. Unlike Beuys, who fetishised such things as grease, beeswax, walking sticks and old batteries, and whose theories were a conflation of Rudolf Steiner and old Germanic and Nordic animist myth, Palermo was a child of postwar Germany. What he began to do with painting was closer, in spirit, to what Bruce Nauman was doing with sculpture. Both, essentially, were interested in human scale, the body as a measuring instrument, and our often absurd relations with the world we have made for ourselves.
Palermo went on to make numerous works "in situ", directly on the walls of galleries and other institutions. He would repeat the shapes and outline of the wall on which he painted or drew, starting a hand's width from the corner or from the floor, painting a wall within a wall. Or he would take the geometry of the frame and mullions of the plate glass and steel frontage of the gallery, and paint these same rectilinear forms on another wall inside. He drew our attention to architectural peculiarities, changing our perception of the space and our place in it. Sadly, these temporary projects are largely lost - one made in Edinburgh College of Art in 1970 has been buried under decades of white emulsion.
When this exhibition was in Barcelona, one of Palermo's last major projects, originally made for the 1976 Venice Biennale, was reconstructed in an old industrial building. This was to be redone in London, too, but a grant failed to materialise. This is a pity. All we are left with from these architectural projects, is documentation and the idea. But much remains of Palermo, especially the name. "Blinky" reminds us of a sudden surprise, and puts the eye first, in the artist's forename. Blink also isn't far from the German word Blik, to look. Blinky Palermo sounds friendly, but also a bit dangerous. Which is how his art is, the more you look.
· Blinky Palermo is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2, until May 18. Details: 020-7402
Monocromo 3, Ives Klein. 1960
