Toby Paterson: After the Rain
Until April 17; Barbican Art Gallery, London

In the early 1940s, cities across Europe were obliterated by German and Alliance aerial attacks. Areas of no particular military consequence were targeted for “terror bombing”, and tens of thousands of civilians were sucked into firestorms created by specially-designed incendiary bombs.

In the midst of this destruction, Surrealist painter Max Ernst made a grotesquely beautiful series of paintings called Europe After the Rain, in which the baroque ruins return slowly to life. And indeed, slowly they did; cities like Hamburg, Coventry and Rotterdam rebuilt themselves in the shape of pristine new ideals. Concrete, glass and aluminium, stark and pure, expressed a brand new hope.

One year ago, Glasgow artist Toby Paterson lost his girlfriend in a catastrophic house-fire. He must know, first hand, the challenge of rebuilding a world after it has been reduced to ruins. Perhaps because of this, the former Becks Futures winner has turned his attention to the brave new worlds built after the war in Hamburg, Coventry and Rotterdam.

This is not an exhibition about destruction; it’s about a new start. Its shiny brightness and constantly changing vistas are inspiring. In theatre this would be a promenade performance, and by the end of your walk you want to turn around and try it in the other direction.

The Curve is an unusual space. The banana-shaped room wraps around the outside of the concert hall, just behind the stage. Some artists balk at the idea of filling The Curve, but if anyone can master a spatial challenge, it’s Paterson. He tempts you through the room with layer upon layer of space, real and imagined.

New vistas open out all the time. Flattened paintings on perspex elide with their own shadows, with empty 3D wooden structures, and with paintings on the walls beyond. Little models, like inflated diagrams, seem to float on abstract pools of colour. On the walls, large painted shapes grow and shrink on the periphery of your vision.

There are hints of Escher here and there, stairways projecting unfeasibly from one platform to another. It’s that sense of suspended reality which characterises Paterson’s images; in fact it dominates the entire gallery.

When Walt Disney invented the multi-plane camera in 1940 it allowed animators to create complex moving panoramas, with different parts of a scene moving at different speeds. Walking through Paterson’s installation is like being inside that multi-plane, inhabiting a space which doesn’t respect the usual laws of nature.

Nature is not much in evidence at all here. There are no skies, trees, flowers, people or animals. The buildings – all taken from reality – look like abstract ideas where human beings couldn’t possibly be expected to fit.

The miniature Unileverhaus looks like a massive corporate logo, and Pedestal is more akin to a Constructivist poster than an actual habitat. The Precinct (Bull Yard) depicts a building which, reduced to its geometrical essentials, is more a work of art than a public building. A strange mix of Mondrian, Judd, Stella and mid-west motel, it’s devoid of the scurrying shoppers and crashing skateboarders which surely surround the real thing.

Among the 24 images and models in this show, there’s just one where the real world does sneak in. A series of three photographs called Transparent Pavilion II depict a glass-fronted architect’s office. The glass door reflects an old building across the road, and you can see the artist too. The foyer is a messy clutter of chairs, and in the door handle, a crushed beer-can has been jammed.

These photos act like a worm-hole, sucking you out of the strange in-between world of Paterson, and spitting you back into the cold, grey light of day. There, the modernist fantasy has lost the sheen of eternal youth.

You need only walk a few short steps to see the reality. Right outside the Barbican is a world of floating stairs, flyovers and concrete lumps. To negotiate your way through this modernist maze you must follow a yellow painted line, which assumes that you will walk in pointy angles and not in curves.

Looked after with pride, these flats are teeming with foliage; their clean concrete lines are interrupted everywhere by trailing ivy. The walls are water-stained and imperfect, and the beautiful idea, as seen in Paterson’s paintings, becomes an unachievable dream.

Paterson is neither a wide-eyed idealist nor a cynical critic of modernist architecture. At the same time he doesn’t occupy the middle-ground: he has created a whole new place to be. In that place, three cities have become one. In that city, concrete meets paper, space meets surface and buildings dream of the way they were meant to be. And the beauty of it is that you can walk right through the middle.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.02.05