Articles

Observer Scotland — Sunday 25 March 1990 “An impressive array of talent as the big one gets off the ground at last” By W. Gordon Smith W. GORDON SMITH is heartened by the Society of Scottish Artists exhibition at the RSA. AT A TIME of great uncertainty about future major Scottish art exhibitions and where they will be hung, the Society of Scottish Artists is in residence at the Royal Scottish Academy and now knows for certain that it will be able to mount its centenary exhibition on Princes Street in October this year. Everything has been in doubt since it became known that the National Galleries of Scotland was discussing plans for the RSA building which would restrict its availability to most of the arts societies who have made it their show place window over the years. And, as happens, essential repair will close the gallery next year. The SSA, second in importance only to the RSA as an association of Scottish painters and sculptors, was forced to activities and confine itself to a show of “works on paper” at the Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, last November. Then the RSA gallery was made available for the show that opened yesterday and which is, in reality, last year’s annual exhibition. October’s centenary celebration will therefore be the SSA’s third show in a year. Despite these hiccups, the current exhibition is a bright and confident demonstration of the healthy state of the visual arts in Scotland. It breaks new ground by embracing a video installation by the pioneering Centre for Video Art Computing at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. There are no fewer than 212 exhibits in four of the gallery’s salons, with sculpture and colourful constructions taking up every inch of available floor space and making an impressive display of creative energy and innovation. If it is true that recent SSA shows feature fewer works by established Scottish painters — there was a time when not many academicians would have missed the chance of being represented, and the work on the walls is less predictable, and of course more space is available for emerging talent. One of the most moving and aesthetically satisfying exhibits this year is Innocence/Remains, Spring 1942, a memorial to the revolutionary dead by the Romanian architect Vasile Töch, who, with René Mönika, have become members of the SSA during their time in Scotland. Töch’s work begins on the floor of the gallery — a thicket of small tree branches decorated with and surrounded by tiny portraits. The eye is led onward and upward to a canvas on the wall, a another symbolic of death, loss and decline, many of them bleached out and faceless. It is a sombre and compelling requiem, suggestive of graveyards, icons and burnt-out churches, a moody presence. Monica Töch contributes Deep Dream, a delightful collage of whimsical but sprightly figures, hung like a parchment scroll. Another outstanding painting is Bill Gillon’s Memory Trace, a large composition binding together the images of two naked females, almost life size, one full frontal, the other in profile, meticulously realistic, rendered in monochromatic sepia and greys. A self-portrait dominates the central space between them. The edges are balanced by two skulls — horse and man — and the palms of two human hands. Like all of Gillon’s work it has disturbing, inexplicably sinister overtones. He has always been one of our great painterly craftsmen, an unrepentant classicist; he goes on plundering his own psyche and visiting the underworld reaches of his mind. It is this time we are more of him in a major retrospective. We see his superb and believable, but the veined sculpture by Hasiong Schafer, particularly his geodesic Sphere — almost six feet in diameter — made up of dinner plates held together by super-glued clothes pegs, challenges that assumption. It is an amazing feat of mechanics and legerdemain, a combination of infinitely pleasing symmetry and huge detail. I also admired (for the second time, I think) Lys Hansen’s raw and primitively powerful Katrine and the Beast; the perky poised menace of cats among pigeons in Gordon K. Mitchell’s Tormentare; two delicate and evocative Asian studies by Mari Bond; John Johnstone’s clever caper If the Blind Lead the Blind; lustrous rak pots by Dave Cohen; Stan Bonnar’s stunning little sculpture of a faceless man; winter collection, Alex Nisbet’s Fruit de Mare; Rob Mulholland’s allegory in space and time, Let it be Known; Fiona C. Danskin’s broody invention, Imaginary Flight; Joseph Dale’s massive triptych of bombers over an industrial wasteland, another Small Day Crept Apologetically By; and the extraordinary ritual performed by literally hundreds of tiny animals in Valérie Anderson’s Bull Dance II. Having spent too much uncomfortable time in that God-forsaken part of the world I was intrigued by the subtle distinctions between Roy Wood’s vision of Tigris and its companion piece Euphrates — and still doubt the word of the Church of Scotland minister who, leading me to the point at which these two great rivers converge, told me I stood on the site of the Garden of Eden. The silly man was obviously oblivious to the claims of Benbecula. There are many other intriguing works in this show: Laura May Morris’s Bathers with its echoes of Gauguin; the intense miniatures by Lesley Bathgate; Jane MacAllister’s pretty icons; the wit of Sylvia von Hartmann’s Unscent Postcards; Aidan Bremner’s ultimate detergent — if he’ll excuse the pun — Flash; Jim Pattison’s sonorous abstract, Violin; Peter McLaren’s continuing odyssey with people hurtling towards some pop-art destiny; Donald Clark’s Ardroi, a symphony of driftwood, rusty metal, old rope and such a sense of an ebbing tide you can almost smell the seaweed.