Toby Paterson: Consensus And Collapse
Until March 28; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Toby Paterson is well-known for his paintings, reliefs, and constructions inspired by modern architecture; for retrieving beauty from neglected concrete walkways and outmoded brick-built monoliths. He is a busy artist, much in demand for high-profile projects such as the BBC HQ in Glasgow, and the Docklands Light Railway extension for London’s upcoming Olympics.

Paterson’s latest venture is a major solo show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, which brings together works from the past 10 years in a specially-built installation. The space is layered and fragmented by a maze of timber-frame corridors, like some gliding Constructivist machine for you to move through. You think you are wandering at will, but the exhibition guide matches you every step of the way.

Paterson’s work is seriously urban, as befits an artist born and bred in Glasgow. The natural world is systematically edited out of his work; weeds vanish, as do flowerboxes, trees, sky – even people. The last thing you would think to call him is a landscape painter. But that, he says, is the best way to describe him.

And it’s true. Landscapists of past centuries would go on their travels to seek out places of beauty, and execute careful studies which were amalgamated back in the studio to create a single, ideal image. Paterson travels to cities to seek out forgotten modernist gems, takes hundreds of research photos, and remixes them in the studio with elegant results. His reconfigured structures are no more fantastical, for example, than Claude Lorrain’s carefully arranged pastoral scenes.

Up until now it has been difficult to know, when looking at Paterson’s work, where the real space ends and the imaginary one begins. Stairs seem to ascend, Escher-like, to the heavens. Functional buildings look like perfect, abstract works of art, and yet the Hypothetical Reliefs look far too grounded in reality to deserve their title.

But among Paterson’s new works are his Bricolages, a stylish homage to photographic collages of the early 20th century. Here, the seams are visible, lifting the lid on the artist’s sleight of hand. Architectural elements are carefully sliced from Eastern European cities, and reorchestrated, with extraordinary command over perspective, to create a believable, vigorous new space. In Pink Bricolage (Bulgaria Poland Russia Serbia), mundane slices of urban landscape end up resembling a soaring space station; the effect is triumphant.

Paterson has a very generous way of seeing. He can tease out beauty from the bleakest chunks of stained street furniture. The 150 research photographs included in the exhibition demonstrate his knack of finding that heroic angle almost anywhere. The artist takes us past the stagnant grime to rediscover the dynamism of every wall; the excitement of its initial design.

Discussions of Toby Paterson’s work never get far without reference to stalwarts of British Modernism such as Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore, but for me, there is a far older comparison. Painters of the Early Renaissance such as Piero della Francesca loved to bring together clusters of architectural form in much the same way Paterson does; exaggerated perspective is emphasized with minute surface detail (just look at Paterson’s obsessively painted brickwork) and even the matte, chalky look of egg tempera is reflected in Paterson’s acrylic surfaces.

Consensus And Collapse, Paterson’s brand new work, takes the energy of his bricolages and translates that back into paint. A multicoloured structure reaches out, patches of fluffy turquoise cloud lingering at its base and tip. You almost expect Renaissance-style angels and putti in this fantastical image; the dream of a long-forgotten, broken down modernist building that it is at last flying, beautiful and free.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.02.10