Art reviews: Frontiers | Geoff Uglow | Leon Morrocco | Frances Priest

Leon Morrocco / Open Eye

Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

Geoff Uglow: Beyond the Clouds, the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★★

Leon Morrocco, Open EyeGallery, Edinburgh ★★★★★

Frances Priest: Unfixing, &Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★

Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now at the Academicians’ Gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy is a survey of contemporary painting seen through the work of 31 painters. The title, Frontiers, does rather suggest pioneers in Davy Crockett hats with muzzle-loading guns opening up new territories, but the tone of the catalogue essay written by Robbie Bushe is in a somewhat different mood. Indeed it is more defensive than pioneering. Rather than pushing new frontiers for painting, he suggests something of a rearguard action as he recounts how, teaching in art schools both in Scotland and in England, he found painting in retreat. There is not much of the once ubiquitous smell of oil paint and turps in the studios nowadays, he says.

There is also some suggestion that the show is an update of the Vigorous Imagination, the exhibition of contemporary Scottish art that made a splash more than 30 years ago with artists like Steven Campbell and Ken Currie. Their bold figurative paintings did seem dramatically new at the time, but there is nothing quite so dramatic here.

Among much else, Lynsey MacKenzie’s big abstract painting, titled Most volcanoes, most of the time are tranquil mountains, is, for instance, a respectable, coherent and energetic piece of gestural abstraction, but that was pioneered by Jackson Pollock more than 70 years ago. The same is true of Kevin Harman’s Nocturne Dreamoria. A big, blue abstract it is perhaps more reminiscent of Clifford Still than Pollock, but is certainly beautiful. It is presented under heavy glass however. Where the surface matters, you do want to be able to see it. Paul Kier works in a rather similar idiom, but in monochrome and painting on unstretched canvas. He has also stretched black thread across his canvas in a way that emphasises the delicacy and indeed importance of the surface. Still in broadly the same idiom, Michael Clarence paints in overlapping veils of colour.

RSA

Olivia Irvine also channels the freedoms of abstract expressionism, but to lend mood, atmosphere and pictorial presence to domestic images. The result with distant echoes of Bonnard is very effective. Lizzie Lillie making semi-abstract paintings from photographs is perhaps less successful. Sharon Quigley’s two large abstracts are more formal and have a cool elegance with clearly defined floating shapes reminiscent of surrealism, but suggested, she says, by the human body. Toby Paterson draws on a quite different artistic legacy, that of de Still, the Bauhaus and other early visions of a modernist Utopia. With this inspiration, he creates elegant paintings of imaginary constructions floating against a polished aluminium ground. The show’s organiser, Robbie Bushe, counters these echoes of the Utopian visions of the 20th century with extraordinary panoramic scenes of how dystopian Edinburgh might have been if the mad Utopian planners had actually been able to carry out their ambitions. They eagerly planned to destroy the city in the interest of traffic flow.

Laura Drever’s two large paintings are billed separately as Tufts and Tussocks, but the space in them seems to flow continuously from one into the other. This makes a diptych and they certainly do work well as a single sweep of Orcadian landscape, her subject and inspiration. A fragmentary pattern of light touches across the compositions suggests at once driving Orkney rain and dappled light on water. The most successful abstract paintings here, however, are Rowan Paton’s two large pictures with oddly contrasting titles, Early Evening Garden of Hesperides and Toxic Work Environment Savagery. In spite of this apparent mismatch, the pictures work well as a pair. The first is suitably elegiac for the mood suggested by its title. Veils of colour like huge individual brush marks and some marks and squiggles of black float against a ground touched with tiny flecks of silver. The other picture is certainly more sombre with predominant blacks and greys, but really with no sign of the savagery in the title. In both pictures, what is really striking is the delicacy and care with which shape, colour, texture and much else from painting’s vocabulary are deployed.

There is figurative art here too, of course. Indeed Rock, Stone, Bone, Kirsty Whiten’s painting of what looks like a naked, stone-age lady lifting two large rocks is almost aggressively figurative. In contrast Derrick Guild paints tiny, disembodied eyes and mouths borrowed from paintings from past centuries. Helen Flockhart’s small paintings of mysterious dream narratives played out by figures in strange landscapes are, however, simple Surrealism, fully fledged.

There are also straightforward landscapes. Catharine Davison, for instance, has nine small paintings rather reminiscent of Constable, while Barry McGlashan’s painting of a boy in a canoe with a characteristically oblique title, The Writer as a Boy, has echoes of Winslow Homer. Alasdair Wallace’s paintings are modest in scale but shine in their poetry, a mysterious door in a wall, for instance, or a boat that looks like Monet’s floating studio.

There is vigorous painting on show elsewhere in Edinburgh too, however. Indeed as though to make the point that painting is not dead, in Geoff Uglow: Beyond the Clouds at the Scottish Gallery, Uglow uses paint in bucket loads. Some of his biggest works here and the most loaded with paint are of his rose garden in Cornwall. What is impressive, though, is that although the paint is literally inches thick, the image is coherent and the overflowing paint suggests the profligate abundance of roses in full bloom. There is also a group of smaller works here in which he has been more economical with his medium. This is a set of eight paintings done from a studio on Calton Hill looking west along Princes Street. If not thickly, these pictures are certainly freely painted and with this freedom the artist captures beautifully the light and atmosphere of this classic view.

Geoff Uglow / Scottish Gallery

Across the road at the Open Eye Gallery, working in the South of France Leon Morrocco has been so productive that, whereas the gallery space is usually divided among several artists, he has filled it all. Large paintings of the mountains inland from Nice dominate the show. In them he has caught both the mountains’ grandeur and the way historic human use is intimately integrated with the patterns of their geological structure. There is, however, also delight when, looking the other way, he has captured the light and textures of the city of Nice itself, painting intricate views though ancient passageways and capturing the flat brilliance of Mediterranean sunlight on the tall walls of ancient houses. The show is a tour de force.

Nearby again at the &Gallery, but working on a very different scale, Frances Priest creates exquisite reliefs from small ceramic elements set in painted wood. It is a kind of mosaic, simple in effect but complex in execution. Each composition is made up of a single, tiny ceramic element repeated, but the glazes are so subtly graduated that light and shade somehow flow beautifully through the patterns she creates.

Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now until 8 September; Leon Morrocco and Geoff Uglow both until 24 August; Frances Priest until 31 August