RSA New Contemporaries 2011
Until April 13; RSA, Edinburgh

Two years ago, the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition was born. It heralded a new approach to the annual student show, honing down the cluttered free-for-all to a more manageable cream of the newly-graduated crop. I noted at the time that big, brassy installations were in vogue, and that the painters were struggling to find their confidence.

It’s all changed since then. Exhibition number three demonstrates a greater maturity across the board, and a particularly strong showing from painters. The prevailing obsession with high modernism has finally lost its grip, giving way to less predictable artistic points of reference.

A shift is evident, from art which is obsessed with its own internal dialogues, to one which is allowed to dream again. Or to have nightmares. With the real world in turmoil, artists are delving into their imaginations to create new worlds of hope and despair.

This move into the uncanny brings with it a stylistic leaning towards Surrealism. It’s there in Anna H Geerdes’s fantastical microcosms of landscape, stitched and pinned and streaming with ants. It’s certainly present in Shaun O’Donnell’s desperately lonely paintings, where visceral severed animal parts stalk silent geometrical landscapes.

It’s hard to say whether this show documents the emergence of a new zeitgeist, or more prosaically, the short-term influence of the Dean’s recent exhibition of surrealist art. The often muted palettes in the RSA show certainly seem to pay homage to British Surrealism as seen at the Dean.

In keeping with Surrealism, but also stretching back through centuries of religious art, is a certain tightly strung beauty which reminds us of our mortality. Charlene Noble’s striking prints of withering flowers bear the heightened colour of melodrama, and Jan Williamson makes exquisite use of shadow in multilayered botanical studies.

Perhaps the most surprising comparison to be made is with Whistler; the American painter’s whispering harmonies sneak through Kimberley Bartsch’s quiet, misty prints of bridges, turbines and pylons. Lyndsey Gilmour’s oil paintings of empty supermarket checkouts are a Whistlerian meditation on night time harmonies.

Sincerity has crept back onto the agenda in recent years, in the form of earnest doodles and naïve scribblings. Out of those, contemporary art has grown new space for care and attention to craft. This is why, in my opinion, the painters have found their feet again.

This year’s show is a high quality offering, demonstrating a palpable shift in the sands of Scottish art. Something is happening, and it’s looking good.

*****

Stephen Thorpe:
False Histories and Confusions in Time 1886

This mind-boggling canvas is one of the stars of the show. Its composition is arranged along Renaissance lines, a room with a geometric floor, a distant vanishing point, and the kind of set up you’d expect for a portrait of the artist in his studio. But its content is emphatically bright and contemporary. Sharp, graphic, esoteric objects cut into the space without rearranging it. Simultaneously precise and messy, the very layout of the room tells a story of theatrical absurdity.

Stephen Thorpe graduated from Gray’s School of Art at 30 years old, or as he puts it, “as a mature student who has played out his hedonistic years and travelled extensively”. This painting, the work of a sharp and busy mind, has won him the RSA Sir William Gillies Bequest Award.

*****

Craig Johnston:
National Apiological Network: An Illustrated Historie

Some art captures your imagination completely, and makes you want to live in its own wonderful world. Craig Johnston’s fictional description of Scottish cities redesigned around the needs of honey bees did that for me. Noting the ecological dangers of a declining bee population, he imagined communities which took pleasure in integrating bees into every aspect of their architecture, tourism, and medicine.

“The cavity of the wall could contain 500,000 honey bees during summer,” says one page of his captivating book, “a biological insulation that emitted a constant 35 degree heat.” Johnston imagines a town where every postcode has its own distinctive flavour of honey, and locals plant different flowers to augment it. His book, prints, and postcode-labelled jars of honey draw you into his fragrant utopia.

Johnston is an architecture graduate from the University of Strathclyde.

*****

Will Guthrie:
The Gold Library of Cononish

Flights of fancy are to be expected from artists, but when they come from architects they can be incredibly persuasive. Will Guthrie has imagined a secret guild of craftsmen, working in the West Highlands to preserve Scottish history by mining gold and engraving data onto it. Centuries later, a ravaged world, bereft of the old digital technologies, discovers the gold scrolls and, with them, Scotland’s past.

Guthrie has made precise topological models and geographical sections of his fictional guild in the excavated landscape. Their careful execution convinces you of their total accuracy. Then, appealing to the senses, are the beautifully atmospheric photomontages, bathed in romantic shafts of light. A lone animal wanders through the dusty pillars of the ruined Cononish Guild, lost and abandoned some time in the future. What a strange, compelling dream for an architect-to-be.

Will Guthrie is an architecture graduate from Edinburgh College of Art.


Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.03.11