Mat Collishaw
Until March 13; Inverleith House, Edinburgh

BritArt famously began with a warehouse show in 1988. Its name – Freeze – was inspired by one of the many shocking images in it, a bullet hole in a man’s head. Bullet Hole put Mat Collishaw at the heart of BritArt from the very start, and his subsequent relationship with Tracey Emin meant there was little chance of escape.

Sensational images were Collishaw’s early stock in trade, quite at home amongst the pickled sharks and the Myra Hindley hand paintings of his contemporaries. But Collishaw was never as media-hungry as his peers, and over the years his penchant for elegance has outgrown the basic compulsion to shock.

Inverleith House currently boasts the artist’s biggest solo exhibition to date, adding two new commissions to a selection of works made over the last five years. While Collishaw still works with images of brutality, the overall impression is strangely beautiful. It’s that grey area between titillation and pathos, between breathless beauty and suffocating disgust, that interests Collishaw.

His brand new work, Colony, is a case in point. Borrowing from Persian tradition, Collishaw has brought together thousands of mosaic tiles to create a patterned floor. The silver, gold and brown tiles form an almost unreadable image, like a heavily pixellated computer file.

In fact, that’s exactly what it is. The pyramid of hooded, naked men was one of a series of depraved photographs leaked from Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, last year. The men were subjected to cruel humiliation by their US captors, and even by looking at the image, circulated around the world, you feel complicit in their degradation. It couldn't be more topical, when this week the world is faced with a new set of photos from the cameras of British soldiers.

Collishaw never had a television as a boy, and he’s been fascinated ever since with the false sentimentality it feeds us. If a shocking image fails to shock, or a pathetic one fails to strike a chord, we worry that we’re emotionally numb. Conversely there is a certain reassuring pleasure in being shocked and saddened. But at some point that pleasure steps over the line, and becomes voyeurism – perhaps even sadism.

The Abu Ghraib photos, with their grinning US soldiers, are seen by Collishaw as successors to the old-fashioned spoils of war, those precious chunks of heritage which spill from every corner of the British Museum. Images are the new stolen artefacts, objects with their own history. Images are currency, victory, and punishment. Looking at them makes you part of that exchange.

Like the mosaiced floor, beauty and destruction go hand in hand throughout the exhibition. There are orchids with human skin diseases. There are cold, desolate celluloid snapshots of war-torn Russia burning and bubbling their way to oblivion. There are flame-licked bunches of roses, and kitsch lotus flowers with drug-hazy prostitutes languishing in their centres.

Collishaw pays homage to art history all the time. Beast in Me, a large photographic print of an androgynous young woman caressing a bull, recalls Caravaggio’s flower-laden teenage boys, and at the same time nods to Picasso’s obsession with bulls. The raft in Asylum, crowded with half-naked men, might be Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, strewn with the dead and dying survivors of a ship wreck.

Rather more in keeping with the old school of art-making than the new, Collishaw’s craft is meticulous. His digital manipulation is seamless, as are his carefully-constructed video installations. Video art has been trapped for too long in the clunky scrap yard of monitors and plinths. It’s a delight to find the moving image peeking out of nooks and crannies as naturally as rabbits out of their burrows.

Inverleith House’s glorious Georgian architecture is the perfect setting for Collishaw’s period pieces, a smooth combination of ornate Victorian furniture and modern video projection. On a four-panelled folding screen is projected the moving image of a peacock, its plumage on proud display. The Victorians would have loved its faintly oriental air of opulence.

At the other end of the room, an elaborate mirror contains the image of a young woman brushing her hair, alternating with an old woman in the same act. Nearby, a glass globe reveals a rose blooming and withering away. The message in these is as old as the hills: everything beautiful will one day die. Collishaw is retracing a well-worn path, but with such elegant simplicity that it’s as good as new.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 23.01.05