Art reviews: Alan Davie at 90 | Steven Cairns: Take Me and It Back | Crossing Alba: Morven Gregor, Gerry Loose, Ian Stephen, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé

Published on Monday 6 September 2010 12:41

Alan Davie at 90 **** Park Gallery, Callendar House, Falkirk Steven Cairns: Take Me and It Back ** Changing Room, Stirling Crossing Alba: Morven Gregor, Gerry Loose, Ian Stephen, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé *** Collins Gallery, Glasgow

• Alan Davie's paintings are packed with geometric and organic shapes

FALKIRK'S Park Gallery planned a retrospective for Alan Davie in his home town to mark his 90th year. But such is his continuing prolific output that the decision was taken to concentrate on paintings made in the last five years .

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Davie has ploughed his own aesthetic furrow. Championed by Peggy Guggenheim in the 1940s, a contemporary of Miro, Ernst and Klee, he had some kinship with the American Abstract Expressionists, yet never allied himself to any movement.

The Park Gallery is still smarting from its move out of purpose-built premises into Callendar House to cut costs, but at least it begins this new phase with a landmark show. There is a nod to the local connection - watercolour sketches for the Grangemouth Mural Davie made in the 1970s with George Garson, a 1922 etching by his father, James Davie, who was head of art at a local high school - but the show gives most of its space to the recent paintings.

Davie's mature work is deft and assured, dancing around possible contradictions: the paintings appear constructed on a flat plane yet have their own depth; they feel spontaneous yet controlled; they are serious and engaged yet full of fun.

Davie doesn't go in for explaining - his work and his symbols are part of an artistic language that is entirely his own. But they are a kind of ocular jazz, improvised and freeform, while still conforming to rhythms and patterns.

They seem to burst with energy, as if those mysterious cogs and wheels might clink into life when one's back is turned. Time has become an important theme, perhaps inevitably as the artist approaches 90. Yet in the hands of a good jazz musician, time can become elastic. Alan Davie is still dancing to his own tune.

Davie's view of the artist is as a kind of shaman, using his original vision to reach out into the beyond. This is a view from which most contemporary artists would run a mile, and one suspects Dundee-based Steven Cairns, a recent graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone, would be among them. Of course, in the postmodern worldview there is no "beyond", and there is nothing new: all that's left for the artist is to cut and paste existing images and ideas and put them together in new ways.

Cairns' modus operandi is cut-and-paste, in his paper collages, his approach to film-making and in the new "installation" on the gallery floor, which has all the aesthetics of a jumble sale.A mass of discarded clothes, old cables and packing materials under a layer of Perspex, it is meant to "consider the physical and tangible aspects of cultural identity", but there is no sense of the material being shaped or presented, no sense of a guiding vision to help us get there.

While Cairns' picture collages have a sense of form and composition, a sensitivity to shape, texture and colour, his film Untitled (In Memory, Imperfect) lacks this sense of clarity. A collage of new and "found" footage, it is meant to be about "ritualisation and nationalism in late 20th-century early 21st-century youth culture", but the snatches of film are too short and, in some cases, of too poor a quality to give a sense of the driving vision.

There is nothing new per se about the two journeys at the heart of Crossing Alba, the multidisciplinary show at the Collins Gallery, but there is a desire to experience them afresh and communicate that. Poet and storyteller Ian Stephen and French artist and film-maker Emmanuelle Waeckerl travelled by small wooden yacht from Stromness to Stornoway at the same time as photographer and theatre-maker Morven Gregor and poet Gerry Loose set out to navigate the Forth & Clyde Canal by rowing boat.

The bodies of work which resulted include immediate accounts of the journeys in film, photographs and log books and more considered works made after the event. So we experience the journeys on different levels: Gregor's thoughtful photographs of people encountered and places glimpsed along the canal are more immediate than Loose's lines of poetry etched on oars and glass bottles, though neither quite seems to do it justice.

The northerly voyage - meant to last nine hours, but taking 42 - is even harder to encapsulate. A snatch of film of a sunset over roiling seas manages to combine the twin senses of beauty and precariousness, if not its length, but it is Stephen's haiku-like text messages which perhaps capture it best: "Across the top/ 42 hours of headwinds/ there's easier ways."

• Alan Davie until 16 October; Steven Cairns until 25 September; Crossing Alba until 18 September.