Lucy Skaer: The Opaque
Until September 25; doggerfisher

Cyclorama: Sanford Wurmfeld
Until September 25; Talbot Rice Gallery

It’s not often you find yourself gazing with admiration at pictures of corpses. You will at Lucy Skaer’s current solo show at doggerfisher, where war-torn news footage escapes its shackles in the horrible world of reality, and floats serenely into pictureland. Here in pictureland, a twisted body can occupy the same plane as a fragile wine-glass, and look just as beautiful.

Is a corpse still the person it was, or is it just an empty image, an echo? And for that matter, can any image be true to the thing it signifies? Skaer’s five huge drawings stretch to breaking point the link between images – no matter how veracious they might be – and the things they represent.

Blown up from photographs in newspapers, from tv footage, and from encyclopaedias, Skaer’s source materials are carefully traced and combined in a few select colours. All planes are conflated into one, so it’s not clear where blood stops and tableware starts. The longer you look, the more you see. The more you see, the more you understand that seeing is not believing.

The images are several degrees removed from their sources. One, blown up from a newspaper image, bears the evidence of worn creases in the paper. Another incorporates the reflection of a camera’s flash in museum glass. Brushwork and pencil marks are deliberately evident in places, to foreground the role of the artist’s hand in recreating each image.

In keeping with current fashions, Skaer’s five huge sheets of paper are unframed, pinned nonchelantly onto the wall as if they’re waiting for the glaziers to arrive. Such coy practices would all be very well if it wasn’t for the fact that a freestanding wall has been built in the middle of the gallery floor, precisely to display the drawings at their best. “Oh this old thing?” the wall seems to say, “I just threw it on.”

It’s a different story in the Talbot Rice Gallery, where one outstanding work of art is the culmination of 20 long years of painstaking research from New York artist Sanford Wurmfeld.

Cyclorama is the American term for panorama, a device invented in Edinburgh in 1788. A successful forerunner to cinema, the panorama was a wrap-around painting which gave viewers the experience of being inside a landscape, a battle, or a religious scene. Monet planned one for his water-lilies, and Wurmfeld has taken the idea one step further to create an entirely abstract panorama.

Wurmfeld’s obsession is with colour theory. Since the 1960s he has steadily pursued the exploration of colour, setting himself challenges and working them out on canvas. A happy accident in 1985 caused him to offset two grids while preparing a painting, and as a result his colours seem to swing off the canvas and float dynamically above it – a phenomenon known as film colour.

Wurmfeld wants you to explore these effects in his enormous cylinder. You can choose to spin around in the centre, or to sweep around the edges with your nose to the surface. The morphing colours will bulge and swarm, your eyes will refuse to blink; you will be consumed by pure colour.

Accompanying the cyclorama are a selection of Wurmfeld’s studies, each a different colour experiment. Unfortunately it is impossible to guess at the subtleties of the artist’s investigations and without sufficient interpretation it is easy to lose interest.

Also on show is a small-scale version of the world’s first panorama – Edinburgh from Calton Hill – but without further reference to the history of the panorama it sits rather uncomfortably with the rest of the show. Finally, it is a mystery to me why – in an exhibition focussed on the cylindrical panorama – the Round Room was used to display a handful of square paintings. If ever there was a chance to use the space creatively, here it is. And there it goes.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.08.04