The most fundamental — and the most difficult — task for the creative artist is to get their audience to suspend disbelief. David Shrigley doesn’t even try to do this; rather his works are enactment of the ground of the impossibility of our own suspension of disbelief; and the Icarus-like trajectory which we describe them we try to elude its surly surfeit of gravity.

Shrigley is thus, paradoxically, an artist who achieves that rarest of phenomena: the capacity to make his audience view the world in his terms entirely. After looking at five of these drawings you begin to find the world vaguely ‘Shrigleyesque’ (relationships are reduced to their component banalities, bodies to less than the sum of their parts), after looking at twenty of them you begin to find the work frighteningly Shrigley-like (the crisis in literature becomes a crisis in orthography and spelling, the death of affect is a result of spindly and smudged genitals), and after looking a over a hundred there is no plane of reality other than that described by Shrigley: giant cantankerous dogs roam the land refusing to let you use their deodorant sticks.

In Shrigley’s world view the capacity for line to express anything is imperilled, on the one hand by naive glossing and on the other by matt betrayal. The Shrigley world is post-lapsarian masquerading as pre-lapsarian: these are humorous drawings done by the child murderers of child murderers. It’s no great accident - I feel - that some of Shrigley’s more sexual depictions bear an uncanny resemblance to the drawings Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer, did of his victims.

Shrigley is showing that all of artistic conception is, in a very important sense, misconception; and that the misconception is implicit in the alleged antinomies: naive/sophisticated; whole/part; framed/unconstrained; to/scale; in/perspective; naturalism/fantasy. Shrigley works to disrupt these by upsetting the formal properties of his drawings, muddying borders, frames, and even the ontological basis of depiction itself.

To call Shrigley’s drawing style anything in particular would be a mistake. Despite the apparent objectification they deal with, these are not in fact, drawings of things at all; rather, they are drawings of the shape that things, people, ideas and emotions make in our lives. I’m not even sure that it would be altogether accurate to call these works drawings at all.

J.G. Ballard once described the conceptual sculptor Damien Hirst as ‘a novelist who writes very short books’, but this wouldn’t grasp what Shrigley is up to. Nor is he a cartoonist except in this particular sense. The very best cartoonists achieve both reductio ad absurdem — ideas and captions internally undermining one another; and a reductio ad infinitum — captions and ideas reflect each other in an endless hall of reflexivity. Their cartoons, on this analysis, become closer to ideogrammatic forms of written language, such as Chinese characters. I think this perhaps captures Shrigley’s work to some extent. Indeed in some bizarre future one could imagine a vast keyboard and on each key a Shrigley image, all ready for one to type out Shrigleyish.

There’s that, and there’s the fact that this artist takes on everything: memory and forgetting, love and hate, murder and preservation, god and godlessness. Shrigley’s quality of line is such as to - in and of itself - imply the universal in the particular and its awful reversal.

I’m convinced that he is a very great nam. Even though I have no idea what a nam is.