Visual Art
Review
PAINTING AND DRAWING
CANALETTO IN VENICE
The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, until 7 Jan 2007 00000
More than anyone, Canaletto is responsible for how we envisage Venice. His paintings were souvenirs for 18th century grand tourists, and most country houses have at least one on their walls. The finest group of his paintings and drawings is undoubtedly that of the Royal Collection. George III bought the entire collection of British Consul Joseph Smith, Canaletto’s friend and agent, in 1762. On display here, in the impressive Queen's Gallery, are 70 works on paper and 14 spectacular oil vedute of the Grand Canal, from one end to another.
Canaletto’s sketches capture the city's buildings and canals in tightly hatched pen and ink, or atmospheric grisaille wash: men and women are merely tiny scribbles, serried ranks of windows in the greatest ‘drawing room' of Europe, gondolas transporting goods on the lagoon. In the paintings, the Doge’s palace glows pink in the sun, and the Rialto spans the Grand
Bridge (Affection)
92 THE LIS‘I’ 7—21 Sep 2006
The Grand Canal
Canal with green reflected light on its underbelly, each detail recorded down to the sharp-bladed prows of the black gondolas. Yet, as well as these sights, still familiar to us 250 years later, Canaletto documents new construction sites. He romanticises the crumbling Gothic-Byzantine buildings, huge tattered flags flying from their belltowers.
Venice is a city of the imagination, where nostalgia is enlivened by the exotic architecture and the glamour of masked festivities. Canaletto’s skill is in this creation of Venice: manipulating space and perspective, he skilfully sculpts La Serenissima to look her best. He slims down a campanile, changes the curve of the canal, moves buildings for the best view. No photograph could produce his 180° views of the piazza, and he gives the claustrophobic canals huge turquoise skies. His capricci - imaginary scenes combining buildings from various places - best represent how we still think of Venice: a beautiful, decaying, impossibly floating city, where masked revellers populate vast Ioggias with dying plants in huge Baroque urns. Venice is still a city that’s highly aware of its own history, a Disneyland for grown ups, recreating regattas for tourists, but beautiful in its faded grandeur - a place where reality and imagination collide. (Ailsa Boyd)
‘ SCULPTURE/INSTALLATION
SCULPTURE. DRAWING AND INSTALLATION
GROUP SHOW - PLAYING BEYOND THE HA HA
The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, RUN ENDED no
A ‘Ha Ha' acts as a separation block between the orchestrated 'wilds' of the COuntrySide from the pleaSure grounds of the plush estate. If is this yonder wilderness that the Embassy's group of five artists claim to occupy. and it is us who have to deCide exactly where our own falling-off point might be.
Neil Davrdson's ‘Thermos Miiseum‘, replete With guided tours and an
ouISide 'Thermos at leisure' gallery
embraces the caravanning dreams and OUidOOrSy history of the flagon over the decades. But his style appears at odds wrth the rest of the exhibition. Sarah Cameron and Kate Hawkin‘s delicate works on paper are barely visible in the darkened front
galleries. while Tonya McMullan's
nauseating stench of her (NF
1 freshening ‘Magic Tree Chandelier'
encourages vrsrtors to leave the
‘ building altogether.
Thankfully, FranCis Summer's mesmerising Video “The End' counters McMullan's kitschy irony and steals the show. With its slo-mo close-ups and thudding repetition from a looped soundtrack, Summer takes the closing shot from Russ Meyer's saucy Vixen! and protracts it into a fantastic piece of abstracted experimental
Video. (lsla Leaver-Yap)
MANFRED PERNICE - COSTA CLASSICA The Modern Institute, Glasgow—,Bat1e_§ep
Manfred Pernice makes sculpture from disregarded materials (plywood and other detritus) to interrogate notions of utopianism and modernity. Costa Classrca is
classic Pernice in that it plays with his beloved ships and containers to create impractical architectural models. Two of the pieces are white plywood plinths. leading to a blue square. and a dinosaur jigsaw. tantalisingly still under wraps.
In his use of recycled materials, Pernice's spiritual antecedent would appear to be Kurt Schwitters (Pernice ironically titled one exhibition in New York Commerzbank). Yet whereas Schwrtters' reclamation of rubbish can become ‘beautiful', Pernice refuses to indulge in aestheticism. ‘Pillar, Basis (Confidencel' is an architectural drawing constructed as an ugly plywood box, in dull browns and oranges. Pernice's Cynicism is best displayed by ‘Rummelsberg (Depressionl'. a mixed media piece in which a photo of a slice of autobahn is recreated with toy bridge and cars. dwarfed by real beer cans and Costa coffee cups. It looks like a fragment of the Chapman brothers work left over by the fire in Saatchi's gallery. Above it hangs a photo of a photo of Sartre with a cheeseplant, over which is scribbled ‘Who Was Sartre?‘ This is a cheap shot, nowhere near as witty as Kippenburger’s classic installations on Teutonic angst.
Ultimately. this exhibition falls between two (rough-hewn) stools: that of Schwitters. whose aestheticism Pernice distrusts. and that of Kippenburger. whose genius for wit and metaphor he lacks. (Brian Beadie)