Art review: Toby Paterson

Published on Monday 1 February 2010 20:05

FRUITMARKET, EDINBURGH ****

THE two great pioneers of the conjoint professions of art critic and art historian, in whose footsteps I humbly endeavour to follow, were Gian Pietro Bellori and Filippo Baldinucci.

Bellori was the art critic. Champion of the ideal in art, his writing was shaped by his belief that it is the artist's role to represent to us, not our imperfect mortal reality, but a more perfect world we can imagine, even if we cannot attain.

More pragmatic, Baldinucci was father of empirical art history. He accepted that it was as valid for an artist to attempt to describe the world as we experience it as to pursue an ideal. The two were contemporaries and rivals and there is one recorded occasion where we can clearly see what separated them. In his argument about the ideal, Bellori proposed that Helen of Troy, however beautiful she may have been, was an individual mortal woman and so her beauty could not have been ideal. Only ideal beauty could have inspired the epic events of the Iliad and only art could portray it. The Trojan War was not fought over Helen's person, therefore, but over her idealised image. Baldinucci reports relaying Bellori's view to the great sculptor, Bernini. You can imagine the snort that prefaced his response: no man in his right mind would prefer a statue to a beautiful living woman.

Nevertheless, Bellori's story does contain a truth that is as valid today as it was then. The whole fashion industry, for instance, and the debate that rages around its impact and its imagery, reflects the potency of an ideal of more than human beauty exactly as Bellori describes it. Nor is it only in fashion that the ideal retains its power. In politics, the three great modern revolutions, the American, the French and the Russian, all aimed to rebuild the world according to an ideal more perfect than the muddled dispositions of unreconstructed human nature.

As Bernini observed the facts of life are otherwise; the actual will always prevail over the ideal. There will always be a painful shortfall between the ideal and its realisation. It is that shortfall that is the theme of Toby Paterson's exhibition at the Fruitmarket, Consensus and Collapse. His art continues the debate 400 years ago of Bellori and Baldinucci and proves its enduring topicality.

I went round the show with the artist. He is clear that he is principally a painter. His work is hard-edged. Its subject matter is architecture; not just any architecture, but specifically Modernist architecture inspired by the abstract idealism of artists like Lger, Mondrian and the Russian Constructivists, and by the architecture of le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, about whom he speaks with reverence. This branch of Modernism was radical and Utopian and with its explicit social agenda, it was in architecture that this Utopianism was most clearly expressed.

Paterson looks at the buildings this tradition has left us, often in the most unlikely places, and interrogates them to discover the aesthetic that shaped them. He then remakes them in images that restore the purity of that original idea. As they are rarely identified, they float free of any association to be enjoyed simply for their abstract beauty. In Processional Form, for instance, he isolates a staircase. Staircases fascinate him, he says. In Hypothetical Relief (Belgrade) he creates a free variation of a ground plan as an abstract relief. Suburban Church and Belgrade Faade are straightforward elevations, but isolated against a plain background. He has travelled to look at buildings constructed under Communism, where the Utopianism was explicit, but there are also works here inspired by buildings from the reconstruction of the bombed cities of Dresden, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Coventry and built, therefore, on a tabula rasa more absolute than any achieved by revolution.

He wanted a dramatic contrast between the lower and upper galleries. Downstairs is crowded and maze-like. The space is filled with big transparent screens suspended from the ceiling. Works are displayed on them, but because of their transparency you see the works in layers. It is as confusing as a fairground hall of mirrors. In his pictures, he uses perspective, but sometimes this too is jumbled in an illogical collage of bits of building that he calls bricolage. The effect of the arrangement of the room is similar to this: a deliberate confusion between painting and architecture, between built space and pictorial space. One maquette is for an actual building, a charming little temporary pavilion in a park near Tower Bridge that he designed, but Paterson is quite clear. He is not an architect manqu. He could never be so prescriptive, so dogmatic as an architect must be, he says. Indeed, even as it fascinates him, he says he remains ambivalent about the architecture that is his chosen subject.

In contrast to the downstairs, the upper gallery is bright and clear and almost empty. He wants you to go from the dark up into the light. There are only five works in the whole space upstairs and two of them are tiny. The walls are finished with scumbled plaster. Its effect is as painterly as watercolour, he remarked with satisfaction. The walls are also articulated in geometric low relief reminiscent of Ben Nicholson's white reliefs. Confirming this connection, Paterson said of Cluster Relief, a serene composition of six rectangles in pink and blue and grey that dominates this space, that it reflects his love of the art of that moment of English modernism in the late 1930s inspired by Mondrian's brief sojourn in London. Indeed downstairs two abstract paintings, Quotidian Painting (White Grid) and Quotidian Painting (Yellow) are also a direct homage to the formal aesthetic of Mondrian and de Stijl.

The work that gives its name to the show, Consensus and Collapse, faces Cluster Relief across the room. A crazy perspectival muddle of the Brutalist buildings on London's South Bank, it is a dystopian vision of modernism gone mad. Paterson himself calls it a Piranesian nightmare and then says it is a homage to Civilia: the end of Sub Urban Man published in 1971 by H de C Hastings, under the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe. It was this book that originally inspired his use of collage.

But it goes deeper than that. The book is a polemic against the runaway hubris of architecture and planning. It demonstrates how an idealist consensus collapsed into egotistical anarchy. Paterson's title shows he knows very well how problematic his subject matter is and how ill Utopian idealism fits the messy way we live. But then that is also its attraction, I think, and the source of the meaning that his work holds beyond its apparent subject. He is not merely a disciple of Modernism, the quixotic champion of a style of architecture that was widely detested when it was built and is now justly neglected. They may be ruined now and they were probably hideous from the day they were built, but he loves rediscovering the beauty of the ideal that is buried in these buildings. Exploring the debatable land between dream and reality, he creates a metaphor for the perpetual gap between aspiration and realisation.

In a separate room downstairs the walls are pasted with several hundred photographs of modernist buildings in different parts of Europe. Some are derelict, some hideous, some covered in graffiti. Others have been adapted grotesquely to accommodate changing social and political circumstances. All show the ravages of time. As TS Eliot puts it: "Between the idea/ And the reality … Between the conception/ And the creation … Falls the Shadow." Eliot's Shadow is the shadow of death, the inevitability of change and of mortality, but as this work demonstrates with such originality, our ideals can still shine through that shadow however dark it seems to be.

&#149 Until 28 March.