Visual art review: Jane and Louise Wilson | Alan Robb: A Painted World

BOOKSHOPS can be dangerous places. You go in for one thing, and find yourself ambushed by another, as I was the other day when I happened upon Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration, by RomanyWG.

No surnames, no pack drill, because urban exploration tends to involve a bit of what the legally minded might call “trespass”. But those prepared to ignore a “Do not enter” sign and take sumptuous photographs inside abandoned theatres and holiday camps feed the fascination of much larger cohort, drawn to the poignancy of tattered chandeliers in long-closed hotels, or the rotting straitjackets of a derelict asylum.

The Ukranian city of Pripyat is a kind of holy grail for urban explorers. Built in 1970 to house workers for the nearby nuclear plant at Chernobyl, it had a population of 45,000 in 1986 when it was hastily abandoned, following one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Situated within the 30km exclusion zone around the plant, it is safe to visit only for short periods.

Sisters Jane and Louise Wilson visited Pripyat in 2010 as part of the 25th anniversary commemoration of the disaster. Their work Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) is a suite of eight large-scale photographs of former public spaces in the city: the swimming pool, the hospital, the theatre, the school room.

They fascinate in the same way that the urban exploration photographs do, with the visual poetry of abandoned spaces and the traces of those who once inhabited them: an open book left on a desk, a towel dropped by the side of the swimming pool. Pripyat is a time capsule, built near the end of the Soviet era, but redolent of the nation’s determination to express its social ideas in the built environment. It is all the more poignant because of the circumstances in which it was abandoned.

A photographer in Pripyat must rise to the demands of the raw material, and the Wilsons do. Their images are beautifully lit, paying lingering attention to textures and colours: a patchwork of broken floorboards, the blues and ochres of rotting plasterwork, the peeling green paint on the walls of the gymnasium. These are as important as the details: the swimming pool clock stopped at 1pm, the curtain billowing through a broken window. Outside, vivid green foliage extends its tendrils, as if it might gradually swallow the city altogether.

In each photograph, the Wilsons have placed a yardstick, itself a piece of obsolete technology as befits a place frozen in time, as well as a reference to the ongoing measurement of radiation in the area. However, in many of the photographs they are all but lost in the richness of the subject matter.

The other major work in this show is the UK premiere of Face Scripting – What did the Building See? a film installation about the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a prominent member of Hamas, in a hotel room in Dubai in 2010, allegedly by agents of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. CCTV footage of the movements of the victim and alleged perpetrators was published shortly afterwards by the Dubai state police and has been watched millions of times on YouTube.

A small screen shows this footage, while a larger screen opposite shows the Wilsons’ film, made at the Al Bustan Rotanna Hotel in Dubai where the killing took place (they were refused permission to film there, so booked a room and filmed secretly). Their lingering camera pans the largely unpeopled spaces of the hotel at night, the corridors and tennis court, and the rumpled king-size bed in Room 230, the room in which Al-Mabhouh died. It’s a cool, impersonal vision of a luxury hotel, shown with a mirror on each side so that the vistas of corridors or bedrooms appear endless replicated.

The Wilsons’ interest in the Al-Mabhouh case comes from a long-standing fascination with both forensics (as their 1993 film, 8.30, shows) and surveillance. The presence of CCTV meant that it was possible for police to trace movements of the suspects, and to apply face recognition technology to the findings. Posting the footage internationally meant that cover would be blown for any agents involved, yet this has not so far resulted in perpetrators being brought to justice. The faces of the artists, painted with black and white dazzle camouflage, fade in and out of the film, posing questions about what surveillance and identification mean in this context.

There is other supporting work here, a suite of prints made in Dundee to accompany the film, and sculptural constructions made from yardsticks, but they don’t engage in the same way that the major works do. Two more Pripyat photographs appear in the second gallery, presumably because there was not room for them in the first, but the light, dimmed for the video installation, makes it more difficult to appreciate them.

Meanwhile, Dundee’s recently refurbished McManus Galleries play host to a retrospective of work by Alan Robb, for 20 years the head of fine art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. A substantial show, including work from 1975 up till 2012, it reveals how Robb’s concerns and themes have evolved and adapted to take in new influences and inspirations. Above all, it shows all this worked out in paint, in a consistently restrained, precise style.

Robb’s early work was heavily influenced by the aesthetics of comic books, using – and deconstructing – the format in large-scale paintings, marrying restraint and composure with a certain whizz-bang vigour. Gradually, these unpeopled paintings give way to an interest in the figure, represented by toys such as Action Man, setting the stage for later when he would continue to investigate toys, ex-votos and figurines. 1987’s Who’s Afraid of the New Technology? asks, at least semi-playfully, whether painting itself will be rendered obselete by the newly widespread ability to cut, paste, layer and collage digitally.

Two paintings from the 1990s sit at the core of the show, physically and thematically. I Am What I Know is sparse and softly toned, but immediately serious. The figure, represented by a mechanical artist’s model, is placed next to a painting by Poussin and a sculptural cross-section of landscape. Robb is engaging directly with his classical art education, and what it means to him. I Live Now, explores the same question, with the artist himself, laden with his painting gear and holding a scale model of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. “I Live Now,” he seems to be saying. “What does it mean to be a painter now?”

Interestingly, I Live Now was painted after his first visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1998, which seems in time to have taken his work in a new direction. Visiting the museums, markets and religious sites of Brazil, he became fascinated by Candomblé, an amalgam of West African and Brazilian folklore and Roman Catholic mythology. The characters of Candomblé, such as sharp-suited Zé Pilantra and voluptuous Pomba Gira, began to appear in new darkly theatrical paintings.

In recent years, his work has moved forward again. Brother David’s Last Mission (2011) includes fragments and layers in a way which echoes some of his early comic-book works, while populated by meticulously painted figures from both Candomble and cartoons. The dark drama has gone, and in its place is a lightness of touch, a freedom to mix and match. In Zé/Palladio Zé’s fedora rests casually on the scale-model of the Villa Rontonda. Has Robb answered the question of what it means to be a painter? Perhaps not, but he lives more comfortably with the question.

Jane and Louise Wilson

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Rating: ****

Alan Robb: A Painted World

McManus Galleries, Dundee

Rating: ****

• Jane and Louise Wilson until March 25; Alan Robb until 18 March