Cool Hunting: The Origin of Ideas
Until July 9; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

I was tickled to read in this paper last weekend that global trend-spotters Nelly Rodi, in their search for the next big thing in male character traits, had asked the art critics first. Their “team of 28 forecasting professionals” roam around asking the likes of me (more fool them) to predict creative fashions before they hit the mainstream. They are what is known in the trade as “cool hunters”.

This is the jumping off point for the Talbot Rice’s current show, Cool Hunting: The Origin Of Ideas. In a departure from their normal diet of solo shows, the gallery has brought together six relatively unknown artists, four of them from Edinburgh, one from Leeds and the other from Salt Lake City. Their common interest, we are told, is in trends. In fact the exhibition is an unhappy marriage between two separate themes: pop culture and the process of artistic creation.

In 1952, the late Eduardo Paolozzi delivered his ground-breaking lecture, Bunk. It was a series of unexplained visual non sequiturs projected from pulp fiction, glossy magazines, technical books and anything else the young artist could lay his hands on. The barrier between high and low art was smashed, and the modern world’s exposure to a constant bombardment of images was acknowledged. This was the birth of Pop Art.

Fifty-three years later, artists are still getting to grips with the ramifications of Bunk, and the majority of Cool Hunting is trapped in its tight grip.

Victor Kastelic’s impressive series of drawings, Cloudburst, is an unsignposted conglomeration of memories, real and imagined, from his own family album as well as from the wider world. Flashy car adverts share space with newspaper photos of disaster, squinting children, cowboys and indians, and pack shots of cleaning products.

Kastelic has stripped all the images of their origins, redrawing them uniformly in pencil and crayon; it’s hard to know where reality stops and mass media fantasy takes over. The artist is hardly the first to go down this route, but his wonderful draughtsmanship makes it a road worth driving down again.

While Kastelic’s concept is pure pop, Kerry Harker’s paintings, made in neat black outlines on Warholian pinks and blues, are more stylistically rooted in the movement. With ruthless precision, she explores how little it takes to convey the presence of stars such as Elvis – we are practically born pre-programmed to recognise his silhouette.

By contrast, Christine Frew’s ugly watercolours make a mockery of their celebrity sources. Even more levelling is the interest she takes in the space between the glamorous figures, sometimes choosing to devote whole paintings to it. Culling images from similar glossy magazines, Lyndsay Mann transforms china-skinned models, with a little glue and paste, into gloomy, gothic lands populated with Boschean monsters. In a gradual progression from Kastelic to Mann, cool hunting becomes cool hunted.

And what of the Origin of Ideas? That territory belongs to the two remaining artists. Angus Hood strips art back to its original ingredients and displays it stripped bare, like a human reduced to the sum of her DNA. Neat rows of brush strokes are digitally enlarged, and little coloured canvasses hang like fragments of a dismantled Mondrian.

Ross Flemington’s smoothly primed boards are home to the most basic forms of mark-making: crude incisions and fingered daubs of colour. The odd reference to the prehistory of Celtic art – a triple spiral from the stone age tomb at Newgrange, and the unshaped edge of a rough-hewn standing stone – suggest that he is reliving the slow invention of art itself.

Quite what Hood or Flemington have to do with trendspotting is a mystery. Perhaps the six emerging artists are trendspottees, but to my mind there is too much in this show which ploughs old furrows. Though very possibly, in those furrows, lies the origin of new ideas.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 19.06.05