Florencia Durante: Light Actions
Until March 16; Corn Exchange Gallery, Leith

Things are getting interesting in Edinburgh. Every time a new gallery opens, it’s not just the range of art that expands.

The city has been dependent for years on a relatively straight-forward mix of state-funded institutions, big and small, along with a well-heeled selection of upmarket art shops. Attempts have been made to disrupt the status quo, primarily by Richard Demarco, but all he got for his troubles was a life-long game of cat and mouse with his creditors.

Edinburgh is finally beginning to catch up with Demarco’s vision of a self-propelled art scene engaged in creative dialogue with the rest of the world. Artists, dealers and curators are setting out their new stalls, one by one, and with every new gallery, there’s a new approach.

Ingleby Gallery and doggerfisher have blazed the trail for a new breed of commercial gallery, presenting international artists in Scotland as well as bringing the work of contemporary Scottish artists to fairs and galleries the world over. Just last month, conceptual art dealer Paul Robertson opened Heart Gallery in which to show off his avant-garde wares.

Although Glasgow is ahead of the game when it comes to artist-run galleries, Edinburgh is catching up. Total Kunst, based at the not-for-profit Forest Café, is anything but conformist, and Embassy Gallery, not yet two years old, runs a professional practice course at Edinburgh College of Art in return for funding.

This month another pin appeared on the Edinburgh art gallery map. The Corn Exchange Gallery in Leith is not quite like any of the galleries that have gone before. Occupying a spacious corporate foyer, the gallery operates alongside a business environment, where the pictures can sneak beyond the gallery space and onto the office walls.

Although these upper reaches of the exhibition can only be accessed by appointment, the Corn Exchange Gallery is more than a glorified office décor scheme. Its director, Caroline Alexander, is serious about using it to showcase the best new emerging talent. Alexander, a sculptor rather than a curator by trade, has spent the last 18 months trawling degree shows up and down the land. Her aim is provide “a new home for emerging artists”, giving them six weeks each to make their mark.

From the moment her husband acquired the dilapidated building for his design company, Navyblue, Alexander had gallery-specific lights and walls drawn into the architectural plans.

The building, rescued from years of dereliction, is breathtaking. The Corn Exchange was built in 1861, on a street which now lingers hesitantly between Leith Docks’ industrial past and its yuppified future. Inside, the receptionist is marooned on a minimalist island in the centre of the gallery space, while the ornate timber braces of the original roof structure arch high overhead.

The first artist to christen the gallery walls is Spaniard Florencia Durante, who has just completed an MA at London’s Royal College of Art. Although her show consists of 18 photographs, Durante’s work is more akin to painting, to sculpture, or even to performance art.

Broad sweeps of vibrant yellow streak across grubby rooms, knocking chairs off balance and enveloping the human body. Shining heaps of molten light bestow a golden glow on cheap plastic seats. Balls of fizzing, swirling luminescence rise and descend like physical manifestations of something magical, spiritual, metaphysical.

If the studio floor was cleaner, and if the wires holding the chairs in half-toppled limbo were invisible, then it would be easy to assume that the image was digitally produced. But the fact is that Durante has changed nothing about her photographs. During long exposures of 20 minutes or more, the artist waved fairy lights through the air, gradually burning their ghostly trails onto the film.

Despite her continued presence in front of the camera, manoeuvring her bundle of lights, Durante is nowhere to be seen. Wearing black and constantly on the move, she is invisible. A painter is implied in a painting by every gestural brush-stroke she makes, and despite Durante’s physical presence in her mise-en-scenes, our only clue to it is the strokes of light she has left behind.

Although some of her photographs do include human subjects, Durante’s most potent characters are a cast of second-hand chairs in a range of narrative scenarios. In Whirlpool, light emanates from a mound of sparkling gold on a seat, arcing over to topple a chair to its right with some force. Meanwhile a further chair to the left is occupied with its own ecstasies, a tall bulb of fizzing light filling its interior space.

Light is the essence of the visual arts and of vision itself. Colour is made up of light. Images are, of course, useless without light. Durante therefore paints with the most fundamental medium that it’s possible to use, summoning it with a sorcerer’s touch.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 19.02.06