In fact I’m a peculiar art critic. “21 million people can be wrong” was the headline (which I conceived) of one of my monthly columns for the art magazine Modern Painters recently. It was about the supposed triumph of Tate Modern’s first five years. I went to art school in the 1970s, I studied painting, and I was formed intellectually by the contemporary art world. I have that mindset but I want to criticise it. I’m part of a scene that I often find insipid — both the feeble objects that we’re supposed to marvel at and the strangulated art-critical commentary that’s supposed to justify them. And my writing (which has been described over the years as “outlandish”, “hilarious and horrible” and a “kamikaze free-fall”) to some extent expresses this.

I polemicise and evangelise, plainly and ploddingly describe things, and make jokes and hurt people’s feelings. But it’s not just venting. The ultimate aim is to get behind the art, not just describing the superficial stuff of what the art object is supposed to be saying but also the sensibility of what it’s saying. I want to demystify the art-world mindset to reveal to ordinary educated readers that there may be aspects of how the art world operates that have quite simply never occurred to them. Many people think artists live in a world very like Siri Hustvedt’s novels: you see the beautiful model, you’re inspired; somehow you tumble into bed with the model. The subsequent artwork expresses all the complexity of your feelings about your life. The statement of my writing is: “That may go on but I’ve never experienced it.” Anybody who signs up to this fantasy simply would not be able to believe the boringness of what being a painter actually involves.

The peculiar thing about my paintings is that they’re not really mine. They’re 50/50 collaborations with my wife, the mosaicist Emma Biggs. I do the painting but she conceives the layouts and thinks up the colours. We share equal billing. We never vary the roles — she never paints and I never question her decisions about the colour. Often I’m working blind as it were, unable to see why certain sections of the painting are the way they are, and sometimes only really getting the logic long after it’s finished.

“Logic” is perhaps misleading, since the paintings aren’t about ideas, they’re purely visual. On the other hand there is such a thing as visual intelligence. We think about how to make the paintings look good, have a focus and seem to have a light turned on inside them. We aim for something as carefully structured as late medieval frescos. The way they relate to my writing is that they embody the values that I find important and serious in art, which really are visual values — the very stuff that has been thrown out by the art world over the past 15 years or so, as art has striven to become more like popular entertainment.

On my own I never got far with painting. When I went back to art school to do an MA, the tutors said I needed to see an idea through and not keep piling on different ones, which merely resulted in meltdown. Perhaps because of my experience as a critical observer I allowed too many possibilities. With these paintings, though, I’ve separated out the aspect of judging whether my decisions are right and handed it to someone else.

How does the prospect of being judged by a critic feel? Am I afraid? Yes. I’ve written the final flourish of the best review so many times in my mind: “Powerful, convincing work from this art-world maverick. Emma Biggs’s radiant colour schemes have brought out the nervous, exquisite sensibility that lurked beneath Collings’s often alarming Caliban-like persona. Together they’ve rocked the art-world. Brilliant!”

The reality may be painful but in the meantime I can still dream.

It was only when the critical aspect was taken away from my art practice that I was able to become an artist. I can do a bit of post facto explaining about our paintings, but I couldn’t actually do them on my own. My sureness about brush strokes, and my ambitions about marks — well, I need someone else to give them a context.

Emma has a whole range of skills in colour that have come from years of working with colour and thinking about it. She has absolute certainty about what should be where as far as visual structure is concerned. I have deployed her certainties, along with my visual skills, my years of experience of using a brush and “doing” paintings (even if they turned to mud in the end), and these paintings are the result. As a critic I would say they’re pretty successful.

Paintings by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings are at the Fine Art Society, London W1 (020-7629 5116), until July 7