Charles Avery: The Islanders: An Introduction
Until December 17; doggerfisher, Edinburgh

In a cluttered old workshop, watched by lithe animals in glass boxes, a bare-gummed old man hunches over his patient. The patient, a tiny winged creature, could be dead or alive, like the beady-eyed animals all around it. Backed into the claustrophobic space around the table, a man and woman, strung tight with anxiety, watch the operation.

You can peer at Charles Avery’s pencil drawing, Avatars, all day, and keep finding clues to his alternative reality. A group of alert little quadrupeds might be alive and moving, judging by the multiple outlines of their heads. The title is just discernible of a book on the sideboard: Manskins. Perhaps the old man is the only live creature in the room, and even the human couple, in their manskins, are the product of his handiwork.

High above, a flock of origami folds flutters like butterflies, trapped in the wrong dimension. These incongruous shapes slip into the work from one of Avery’s previous stories, where a three-dimensional object causes chaos in a two-dimensional world. Here, they add to the general sensation that something is wrong, and that the sacred divisions between life and death, reality and representation, have somehow been transgressed.

This is one of Avery’s most complex compositions to date. It is constructed with mathematical precision, the vanishing point left visible in the margins. But that draughtsmanship is coupled with Avery’s confident fluency, his talent for caricature, and an unflinching faith in improvisation. A leg is seen through a ladder, a foot through a chair. The crumpling woman’s boots are tried in one place and then repositioned. These don’t come across as mistakes, but as further clues to an eerie world where everything has its own ghost.

Avatars is, without question, the star of Avery’s doggerfisher show. The five other pieces, mostly drawings, contain echoes of its cleverness, its drama, and its fluency, but not all at once. Eternal Forest is a precise homage to Florentine painter Paolo Uccello. Leonardo’s grotesques are evoked by Avery’s animated sketches of two dogs struggling to share one head.

In the centre of the room, three sculpted cobras face another three on either side of a mirror. Seen from any angle, the real merges seamlessly with its opposite’s reflection. This is the kind of optical experiment which would have fascinated Renaissance artists. Before long, however, you will find yourself returning to Avatars, a work quite simply beyond compare.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.11.05