Art reviews: In Orcadia | Wings of a Butterfly | Icons on Ammunition Boxes

In Orcadia, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

Wings of a Butterfly, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★★

Icons on Ammunition Boxes: Transforming Death into Life, St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh ★★★★

Let’s hear it, if you please, for group exhibitions, the best of which invite works from different places and times into conversation with one another, and shed new light on those who made them.

The theme can be quite simple, like In Orcadia at the RSA, which shows us different artists coming to grips with the elemental landscape and weather of the Orkney Islands. At the centre of the show is a body of work by Samantha Clark, the inaugural winner of the RSA MacRobert Art Award for Painting and an Orkney resident.

Clark’s work here is considerable, all the more so given her process, the application of detailed webs of paint or tiny marks over rich washes of colour, sometimes on a monumental scale, a process akin to meditation, each one surely the product of many patient hours.

Her subject is water, often the ocean. In a suite of ten paintings, she approaches it in different ways: sometimes, waves are described by painstakingly drawn patterns of ripples, or tiny vertical marks; other times, the marks are looser, criss-crossing, feathery, like spray, or a flock of gulls taking flight. She employs the iridescent qualities of gold leaf, brass leaf, mica. (There are parallels here with the work of Bet Low, another lover of Orkney, whose work is currently in the Reid Gallery at Glasgow School of Art.)

The four largest works, on aluminium panels, have more abstract qualities, or at least have the quality of looking more deeply into something: the muzzy grey-white of haar, the blue-black of deep water. The slow power they exert invites the viewer to slow down too, to think beyond representation into more abstract ideas.

Clark’s work benefits from being drawn into conversation with the work of others: Barbara Rae’s paintings of Yesnaby, strong shapes and strong colours; Frances Walker’s elegant lines - her etching Cliff Path, made last year at Aberdeen’s Peacock and the Worm to mark her 94th birthday, is based on a plein-air drawing from 1981.

Sculptor Anne Bevan, Orcadian by birth, looks at labradorite boulders brought to the islands as ballast from the coast of Canada in 19th century in a collaboration with archaeologist Mark Edmonds. Frances Pelly makes relief landscapes on slate, by drawing, painting and adding pieces of local clay. Her concertina books capture a sense of an artist out in the landscape trying to get to grips with what she sees.

Victoria Crowe was a recent visitor to Orkney thanks to an RSA Residency for Scotland award. Low Winter Sun, Linkhouse Window is an intriguing, complex picture, depicting the setting sun reflected back from her studio window. Despite its gorgeous blues and golds, it unsettles the viewer with its layering: are we inside looking out, or outside looking in? As is often the case with Crowe’s paintings, we’re doing both, literally and metaphorically.

Installation view of Wings of a Butterfly at the Ingleby Gallery | John McKenzie

There’s a conversation across time in Wings of a Butterfly, the ambitious, triumphant show which starts the year at Ingleby Gallery. The artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) wrote in one of his final diary entries: “I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly”. This show puts his work (two paintings, three drawings) alongside 11 painters and a sculptor from the 21st-century.

They are artists who already had a relationship with his work. It turns out that the things that made Bonnard different from his peers, and perhaps more difficult - his casual compositions, the way he could make a subject start to disappear into the backdrop, his tendency to resolve a work while leaving areas eerily unresolved - are right up the street of contemporary painters.

This impressive gathering of artists find kinship with Bonnard in different ways. For Chantal Joffe, it’s something about the directness of his figures, captured in mundane settings. Andrew Cranston says he thinks of Bonnard every time he’s in a bathroom, and his large painting, Fairly Liquid, is tremendous: the figure in the bath almost disappearing into a dazzle of patterns and light, any pretence at grandeur undermined by the bottle of Fairy Liquid floating in the tub. Phoebe Unwin is in the bathroom, too, with A Bath Six Times Over, which seems to merge and overlay different moments in a single complex picture.

A haziness or uncertainty in Bonnard, what Picasso disparagingly called “a potpourri of indecision”, chimes with artists today. Lorna Robertson’s Half-remembered names and faces hovers on the edge of abstraction, as does Michael Clarence’s Two High Hearts, though both artists have roots in painting the figure.

Hayley Barker’s wonderful painting Tessa’s Garden is clearly enjoying a chat with Bonnard’s Garden at Le Cannet and Nick Goss’s Hotel Paradiso is an interior with strange lapses and uncanny shifts in perspective. Sculptor Joel Tomlin can’t make free with gravity and shapes the way a painter can, but his wooden platters and the objects on them have a similarly disconcerting effect.

Some of the most intriguing work in the show comes from Philadelphia-based Aubrey Levinthal, who will have a solo show at Ingleby later this year. Nights in C’s Room and Hotel Buffet in Colorado start with ordinary scenes, made uncanny by shifts in scale and point of view, and vast stretched tabletops which we seem to view from above, while people and objects are viewed laterally.

With only a small selection of works by each artist (in some cases just one), it’s possible they have presented their work at its most Bonnardian for this show. However, this clever grouping does what the best group shows do: it sheds fresh light on them, and on Bonnard, while drawing attention to some key concerns in contemporary painting.

Detail from Ikonen 96, by Sonya Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko | C. Sonya Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko

Meanwhile, in Icons on Ammunition Boxes, two artists from Ukraine, Sonya Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko, are presenting their version of swords-to-ploughshares in the form of the icons of saints painted on reclaimed wood from ammunition boxes. The small collection on show at St Giles’ Cathedral details where the boxes came from and who brought them back - one came from Bakhmut with special forces, another from Kyiv region with volunteer doctors - and they are being sold to raise funds for the Ukrainian cause.

What’s interesting is the way in which the ancient language of icon painting comes alive, even in a non-religious age hung up on individual expression. St Nicholas, St George, St Andrew and particularly the Virgin and Child take on a mythical, symbolic quality: St George spearing the serpent, Mary, Softener of Evil Hearts. In difficult times, perhaps, the old symbols are the most potent, painted here on very physical reminders of a war which is in danger of slipping from our attention simply because it has gone on for so long.

In Orcadia runs until 2 March; Wings of a Butterfly until 19 April; Icons on Ammunition Boxes is at St Giles’ Cathedral until 13 February, moving to Edinburgh New Town Church, 13 George Street, from 21 February until 20 March.