PAINTING
OUR HIGHLAND HOME: VICTORIA AND ALBERT IN SCOTLAND
Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
Edinburgh, until 5 June 0..
With more references to bagpipes. Iochs and plaid than a tourist shop. Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were clearly not shy of a bit of local flavour while on their Scottish holidays. and the artworks gathered here from both private and public art collections build up quite a unique portran of the Royals' times in the Highlands.
The humanising title of the exhibition presents the couple on humbled first-name terms. Bill the unprecedented luxury of their holidays is a little at odds With what they believed was the ‘simpler' Scottish lifestyle. The Royals saw local peasants as leading a trouble- free. romantic existence and they are the subject of many of the paintings »- although the exhibition lightly passes on the true hardship of the Highlands‘ rural inhabitants. The 3xguisitely sentimental portrayal of peasants‘ squalor and poverty is often uncomfortably saccharine. patronismg and sometimes faintly ridiculous.
But in spite of this. other areas of subject matter on display gather together some of the finer artists of the period. The steeped traditionalism of these Victorian paintings is perhaps not the most fashionable of tastes. yet the quality of Landseer's oil paintings is strikingly exceptional. Joseph Mallord William Turner's impressionistic, ghostly canvases appear to glow and shimmer with beautiful watery gold and reds: years of careful conservation of these works make them sparkle with remarkable freshness of detail.
The exhibition's meticulous documenting of the Royal couple's various travails. as well as its inclusion of dresses. wooden dolls and Albert‘s own designer ‘Balmoral' tartan. also seems to hint more at the historical rather than artistic interest. and it is this veracious approach to detail and display that reveals an intimate. almost fairytale ponrait of the pairs time in Scotland. (lsla Leaver-Yap)
PAINTING WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW 8. BLUE? lngleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 14 May 00..
Not the lngleby Gallery, in answer to the exhibition’s title. In celebration of colour, works by David Austen, Ian Davenport, Callum lnnes, Winston Roeth and Dillwyn Smith resonate with bright confidence on the light walls.
Callum lnnes’ ‘Isolated Form’ hangs deep and red - the canvas fibres seeped in virulent crimson, all but for a little spot just off-centre. The modest speck holds the strength of the colour in check; it is a mighty responsibility for such a wee thing.
Across the side a big yellow board, ‘Inside Yellow’ by Winston Roeth, stretches wide against a long wall; brilliant, sherbetty yellow, framed by a deep forest green border. There is something bordering on danger with this one - not sunny, more urgent and insistent, offset by the dark green. It is like big board of energy — a solar panel in a barren desert.
Squaring the circle, so to speak, in this room is Ian
MIXED MEDIA KATE DAVIS AND HENRIK OLESEN Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 2 Apr 0000
By reduCing colour to shades of grey and form to line. an air of seriousness falls over the Transmission Gallery. The walls are gunmetal. the floor is battleship and the gallery becomes a sterile yet seductive showroom. Berlin-based Henrik Olesen's Silver exhibition cases add to the feeling of measured examination by presenting his collages '1935. 1922. 2003' like manipulated eVidence. His art reworks and reinvests Max Ernst's ‘La femme des IOO tetes'. tying images of queer BDSM Ibondage domination sadism masochismi into the knotted aesthetic. Homoerotic deSire is Spliced with artistic volition and the collages come to resemble serious but erotic bouquets — Rodchenko's photomontages with an air of sex and violence.
Kate Daws reduces her already refined aesthetic further, subtracting the emotional effect that her previous anthropomorphic forms, bruised With ripe colour, had on the yiewer's eye. Pencil and etched lines seratch at the subject and the Surface of the paper. yet a soft. brushed pelt seems to cover and skim her forms.
The figure in "Player (first acti'. 2005. is buckled over a plane that Juts into his solar plexus and the edge of the paper. His head is Surrounded by a halo that mirrors the steering ~.-.heei attached to the wall under the print. possibly alluding to the source of his cataIOnic state - a car crash trauma Or saintly ecstasy? Davis gently but firmly demonstrates that the movement between inside and Out. subject and obiect can be a yiOIent convulsion WIIh the Viewer as witness. iAlexander KennedyI
Inside Yellow by Winston Roeth
Davenport’s ‘Untitled Circle Painting: Dark Purple, Magenta, Dark Purple‘. The oil paint glows through almost like a backlit oil slick while a ring of pink trails in a near-perfect circle - the little blobs and drips spoiling the clean line but adding tactility.
Next door Callum lnnes‘ second work, ‘Exposed Painting Cerulean Blue‘, is a square of silky sea blue within white. Two edges are clean, white one bleeds into the background. The piece is clean and fresh looking as if you’re looking at the spring sky.
It seems strange, then, to have a dark anti-colour piece by Roeth. ‘Night Bird‘. Acting as a contrast, is deep black, framed by a shiny tan-coloured border. It saps the energy from the other works rather than emphasising their vibrancy.
Nestled, though, in the corner are three small works which seem to sum up the spirit of the show. Gouache paintings on handmade paper by David Austen are fun, uplifting and celebratory. In one a smooth, curved, phallic shape rises up in orange joy. Hooray! (Ruth Hedges)
Molim, 1922. 2003 byI-IonrikOIoun
X I.‘ia'-—‘-1r’<z,' THE LIST 103