Art reviews: Tony Swain | A Parliament of Lines

WE ARE are pretty good at centenaries. When its year comes up, almost anything that might offer a market opportunity will get the treatment. However, one significant one that, so far at least, we seem to have missed is the centenary of collage. It was in 1912 that Braque and Picasso started to stick things on to their pictures. Braque began it, but it was Picasso who first used it in a painting when he stuck on a piece of material with a chair cane design and called it Still Life with Chair Caning. It was a small act of revolution, puncturing the pretensions of high art and the burden of the traditions of oil paint with a defiant and tangible link to the everyday.

Of course, there was nothing new about sticking things on to things. In fact it was a Victorian passion, but doing it on a picture that would go into an exhibition as serious art was quite new. In the light of what Braque and Picasso were doing, it was nevertheless also logical. With Cubism they had subtly shifted painting from being about what we see to being about how we see; from a single vision, static in time, to one of joined up fragments extended in time. So, if it is a matter of associated fragments, why not simply put in one, or indeed several?

Doing so was a reminder, too, that, like any perception, a painting is a construct not an illusion. The piece of printed material can, by association, say “cane bottomed chair” just as well as an elaborate drawing, and of course it is also a double pun; the material is already a representation. There’s a painted newspaper in the same picture, but it wasn’t long before actual newspaper began to appear. Newsprint made a nice contrast to the surface of the painting, but was also a neat shorthand for other things: leisure in a café to read the paper and the social context of the café, for instance, but as newspapers are ephemeral and specific to a day, they were also obliquely an image of time itself.

In the intervening century, collage has proved one of the most versatile tools of modern artists. The Surrealists greatly enlarged its power of association to create a model of the workings of the unconscious mind. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg followed the Surrealists, but by using newspaper with topical imagery he gave his work a dimension of current protest. At the Fruitmarket, Tony Swain follows all this. He says he does not like to call his pictures collages because they are not, in fact, all collages, but a good many of them are, and his chosen support is always newspaper, a material almost definitive of collage. So whether he likes it or not, his art belongs squarely in the 100-year-old tradition that we have forgotten to celebrate. Perhaps his show at the Fruitmarket should have a little extra subtitle to mark the centenary.

Swain’s pictures are painted on newspaper, unframed and stuck up on the wall just like that. They will be a conservationist’s nightmare in due course, but meanwhile what are we to make of them? Some are apparently abstract, but mostly they are landscapes, strange disjointed scenes with mountains, seas and stormy skies above fragments of seaside resorts or ruined townscapes. There are no people in any of them and they never seem to be a single space or event, but a composite, evolving vision filled with enigmatic drama.

Swain comes from Northern Ireland and in one picture a fragment of exposed text includes the words “sectarian bigot”, but generally there is little evidence of the newspaper itself or any message it might carry. The printed page may be his starting point, but it doesn’t actually seem to be significant, unless, like the casual way the pictures are hung, as a counter to the expectations we bring to a painting.

You wouldn’t think it was so casual, however, if you read what Isla Leaver-Yap writes about it in the catalogue: “The generated images are a reimagining of the printed page as a subject in possession of an unconscious desire, a page that dreams of itself beyond the confines of its literal definition. An imaginary document, the artwork is revealed to be in possession of an auratic potential, an abstraction that is an exhibition of desire.” Phew! Who would have thought it? Nobody, I suspect, least of all the artist. Indeed, disarmingly, he says at one point in an interview, also in the catalogue, that he started using newspaper simply out of economy.

But isn’t that paragraph magnificent all the same and, although it is almost meaningless and not even English, doesn’t “auratic” sound grand? In fact it is a piece of cult jargon derived from the German of the pre-war critic Walter Benjamin, where it is an adjectival form of “aura”. Poor Benjamin, he has innocently spawned some of the most opaque and pretentious writing in the English language. This is a good example.

Indeed, as so often with contemporary art, it is a commentary that burdens the artist with dubious pretensions that have nothing to do with his art. You can see how painting on newspaper served him well originally and not only for economic reasons. Just as collage did for the Cubists, it freed his painting from all the inhibitions that go with paint and canvas and allowed his imagination to flourish. Now seen through this prism of pretension, it seems unfairly to be just a gimmick. He should break the bonds with which this jargon binds him and move on.

If Swain is exploring the legacy of collage, across the road Parliament of Lines at Edinburgh City Art Centre is a group show that explores the place of drawing in contemporary art. Drawing is not, as it once was, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is just one option among many, but it has certain intrinsic characteristics which make it attractive to artists with very different preoccupations. The artists here include Alan Johnston, Charles Avery, David Shrigley, Paul Chiappe, Moyna Flannigan, Nathalie de Briey, Anslie Yule, Callum Innes and several others. They are not all Scots, but are all connected to Scotland in some way, and a good many have spent time at Edinburgh College of Art.

Johnston, who taught there for many years, has done an elegantly minimal wall drawing that shows how on a white ground the delicate marks of the pencil can signify far beyond their weight or compass. De Briey is also minimal, but with more freedom and the addition of delicate touches of watercolour. Shrigley’s minimalism is in the graphic tradition of the cartoon and Chiappe’s is simply minute, with exquisite copies of photographs no bigger than a postage stamp.

Yule draws meticulous constructions that are enigmatic and engaging. At the opposite end of the graphic scale is Flannigan who, with echoes of Goya, draws couples, including Adam and Eve, in amorous exchanges in vivid black and white on grey paper. Avery is an artist who only uses drawing, and only ever draws scenes from his fantasy island, but his draughtsmanship lacks the spontaneous vigour that makes Flannigan’s work so attractive and so his fantasy always looks laboured.

Watercolour was traditionally a branch of drawing and so Innes qualifies for inclusion with a series of exquisite rectangular studies in colour. He uses pigments in pairs, lays down saturated washes and then lifts them off, so that while the pure colour still registers at the edge, the centre is its ghost, just a memory in the almost monochrome traces left.

• Both until 8 July

TONY SWAIN: DROWNED DUST, SUDDEN WORD

FRUITMARKET GALLERY, EDINBURGH

Rating: ****

A PARLIAMENT OF LINES

CITY ART CENTRE, EDINBURGH

Rating: ****