RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★
David Evans, RSA, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★
The RSA’s New Contemporaries show is a bit of a high point in the exhibition year. The Academy selects who they see as the most promising artists from the previous year’s degree shows in Scotland’s five art schools, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and the Moray College in Elgin, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands. The show that results always has a special appeal. These talented (mostly) young artists have an advantage too. The society shows held in the RSA building usually number several hundred works and as many artists. This show is limited to around 60 artists and so they each have their own space. They each have a mini-show, or indeed just present a single much bigger work.
A case in point is Emilia Evans-Munton’s colossal Keep. As its name implies, it is a castle and it stands foursquare in the middle of the floor with turrets, battlements and a massive bolted door. Finished in sand over a wooden structure, it is in effect an enormous sandcastle. It is certainly a statement. Natalia Bojarska’s large sculpture of cut sheet steel is on a similar scale and is very impressive even without the sounds that she sees as an integral part of it. On a similar scale, Oli Turner has made a full-size set of standing stones. Not of stone but of wood and plaster, they have spy holes into illuminated interiors as though we are looking into the stones’ mysterious past. The megaliths are also accompanied by rather good photographs of actual neolithic sites.
Some of the painting is on a pretty grand scale too. Christopher Ivor Adams, for instance, has five large canvasses which seem to riff on hymn singing and, in a slightly macabre touch, on graveyards. Indeed the smallest of his paintings is of a gravestone. Tom Speedy tells us that his three large canvases are the width his outstretched arms. Though it is not quite clear what that signifies, the middle painting of a boy silhouetted against a sunlit sea is rather beautiful.
Aisha Plumridge’s painting The Woods First Wake, one of three, shows a group of young people and a horse in slightly uneasy relationships and it seems to have echoes of Steven Campbell. So too does her very striking Behind the Sleeper’s Eye with two sleeping figures and a ghostly dream above a townscape. Campbell is an excellent model.
Three big paintings by Elene Strurua of a man, a woman and a dog are also figurative, but boldly and simply conceived they achieve real monumentality, especially the man sitting solidly in a chair. On a different and smaller scale, Lisa Speirs-Fleming has made a series of linocuts. Beautifully executed in a clear and lucid style, she says they are reflections on motherhood. We can see that in places, but her imagery is strange and predominantly marine, with an omnipresent and rather sinister octopus. Equally strange is Daye Allan’s Daye Ja Vue, an assemblage with an a kind of Green Man for our times at its centre. Dressed in many-coloured motley, the figure is not hung with the proverbial leaves and greenery, but with DVD and Video cases. In a very different mood, however, this bizarre figure is supported by 20 delicate little paintings of photographic simplicity.
Malachy McCrimmon’s dominant image is a big picture of dolphins. It seems to be composed using collage, so there is much else going on to achieve what he cheerfully describes as “a dense cacophony of chaos and obscurity.” To be fair, his stated aim is to explore the collision of technology and ecology which might well produce just such a result.
There are many others. Outstanding among the figurative or semi-figurative work here, however, is that of Iris May. Her Exit the Garden, for instance, is a vertical composition of two figures embracing. It is beautifully balanced between the figurative and abstract and the degree of abstraction somehow lends feeling to the figures’ embrace. She shows the same command in her other paintings and indeed in a reclining figure on the floor composed of flat planes of painted cut-out cardboard.
There is of course plenty of non-figurative work too. Rosie Hodgson Smith’s Schedule One, for instance, one of two large abstract compositions, is rather beautiful. Veronica Mee’s gestural abstract compositions are also very beautiful. Ingeniously, she appears to have used bleach to create the paradox of flowing marks of reserved canvas. Annabelle Pelaez paints with equal freedom and poetic effect on unstretched canvas.
If the show is dominated by the very large, there is also some work that is very small. Poppy Gannon, for instance, actually stitches minute patterns onto dead leaves. It is a feat of extraordinary delicacy, and while throughout the show the “be your own art critic” artists’ statements the students have to write don’t often match what is in front of you, what she says does seem to be reflected in her work. By attending lovingly to objects in a state of decay, she questions “the ethics of our deposable society.”
On an even smaller scale, Mia Coutts composes a large landscape out of separated square postage stamp-sized elements. There are 1,736 of them. she told me as, painstakingly, she stuck each one into its place on the wall. However, the last word should go to Tom Gibson. He has translated the whole of the RSA’s lengthy exhibitors’ agreement document into Scots and hung it as a banner on the wall. It makes a much livelier read than the original, and it is no bad thing in this its bicentenary year to remind the RSA of its identity. Maybe they should adopt his rendering in future.
Meanwhile, in the Academicians Gallery in the same building, there is an exhibition of the work of the late David Evans. Always known as Di, he was a Welshman who made his career here and a poet of the stillness of lonely figures in empty streets, or often, too, in industrial landscapes.
There are echoes of Edward Hopper in pictures like The Doorway, a figure standing by a doorway lit by electric light, or of de Chirico in This Day Let the Sleeping Lie, a painting of a dog and a ghostly figure in an empty street. There is also something of Magritte in Roof II, a painting of a shadowed roof. There are lights in two dormer windows, but their pitched roofs are also just catching the light of what we imagine is the setting sun.
Technically he is brilliant and for all these echoes of other artists, the poetic mood he achieves in pictures like this is very much his own.
RSA New Contemporaries runs until 22 April; David Evans, RSA until 26 April
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