Liquid Soft Lightning Touch
Until April 2; doggerfisher, Edinburgh

In the four years since Susanna Beaumont opened doggerfisher, her taste in art has been revealing itself gradually. Now, after a few years of global talent spotting, the gallery director has pulled together a group show of her international discoveries. It must have been a liberating move, inspiring Beaumont to poetry in naming the show.

Liquid Soft Lightening Touch exudes a sense of personality. You could say it’s the gallery’s coming of age, the unveiling of the definitive doggerfisher style. The poetry goes far beyond the title; it’s all around, in the lyrical handling of materials, the intricate traceries, the gentle spatial playfulness.

Myriam Holme combines the rich, luscious waywardness of glass paint on aluminium with exuberant extrusions of wire and coloured thread. Markus Amm builds up intelligent compositions with rubbings, cuts and folds. Tam Van Tran creates a frenzy of pictorial activity with beet juice, staples and split peas, while Olaf Quantius introduces metallic silver into an otherwise conventional oil palette.

All of the artists are playing with their materials, loving every minute of their relationship with them. It reminds me of the hours I spent as a child, sitting engrossed on the floor with glue and scissors, exploring every possible combination of whatever bits and pieces I could lay my hands on. It’s that kind of intimate, personal space which the artists invite us to share.

Markus Amm’s paper-based works are faded homages to Malevich and Kandinsky. The Russians were masters of bold colour and even bolder composition, but Amm’s designs are like shadows of their suprematist forebears, exposed to 90 years of daylight and darkness.

Circles and wedges, though spraypainted with red and black ink, look pink and grey. Simple folds streak through the works without a spot of pigment; cuts, sellotape and chalk rubbings add to the sense that these compositions are nothing but circumstantial evidence, none of it stamped with the authority of fate, or indeed, of innocence.

Olaf Quantius’s beautiful canvasses depict a single moment of perception. A house floats in a silver sea, its outline offset behind it. Vertical trees rise up out of nowhere, foliage a blur. Horizontal drips and empty areas of canvas suggest the motion blur of a snatched image, seen momentarily from a train; not like a photograph, but a patchy picture straight from the brain.

Shannon Bool occupies the small second gallery with space-bending works. Origin/Inversion combines rugs from two Flemish masterpieces in one wall drawing, their edges meeting in the corner of the room and running up onto the ceiling. A curve of furniture board on the floor extends the sense of spatial trickery and would probably meet with Jan Van Eyck’s approval. He’d certainly spot the parallel with his famous mirror from the Arnolfini Marriage in Bool’s photogram opposite.

The seven artists in this show are not terribly similar, but taken as a whole they work in total harmony. Their art has the fragile beauty of finely-painted porcelain, a world of ideas contained in every piece.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.03.05