Bren O’Callaghan A Runaway at the Media Circus!

Edinburgh Art Festival 2010

Two days, one night, 4 Fringe performances and 8 gallery shows later, I leave Edinburgh sated and satisfied. I’d tried to stay away having drunk a generous mug of the EIFF back in June, but no – the flesh may have been weak but the spirit wasn’t taking no for an answer. I like being alone to attend the Edinburgh Art Festival so that I can muse silently upon any and all stimuli to hurl themselves across my optic windscreen without having to express my opinion aloud; preferring the cognitive equivalent of grunts. Urgh. Me no like. Urgh. Orange. Like an… orange. Urgh.

Martin Creed with Down Over Up at The Fruitmarket Gallery concerned himself with stacked items in order of progression and size, an approach no less polarising than his Turner prize winning ‘The Lights Going On And Off’, in which the bare bulbs in an empty gallery did just that. Instead it was his felt-tip paintings, panels of apparently solid shades that on inspection had been executed using contrasting pen strokes, that had me cooing and thinking of how I used to shake out the fibrous, Tampon-like interiors of my own pencil case to cheat for ultra fast-colouring.

Over at Stills Gallery on Cockburn Street, a retrospective of Alexander and Susan Maris’ photography, The Pursuit of Fidelity, displayed palm-sized pools of black and white intensity that appeared to defy gravity by not sliding in brackish streaks down the blank, white walls. Preoccupied with landscape, stillness, myth and the resonance of personal and geographic histories, these sniper-sight works possessed a telescopic focus, sometimes sharp, others clouded in a gelatin fog, landscapes condensed and reduced to precise cameo-like profiles of earth and sky.

blipfoto were in residence at Inspace with Life Turns, nurturing a spiked forest of zoetropes to reflect the principle call to arms: a collaborative, Alt-w funded project from the Bafta Award-winning online photography platform, aided by an iPhone app that allowed contributors from across the world to submit their own strolling bodies – view the finished project above. It was this approach in clarity and purpose that impressed me most acutely whilst dodging the pipers and pounding the pavement this year, found also at the Ingleby Gallery and Talbot Rice: both brave enough to pass over kaleidoscopic variety and theatrical installations for solo artists working in paint.

Ingleby Gallery was a breath of fresh air once I’d managed to rediscover the secret route through the Waverley Railway station thanks to an Escher-like conundrum in which the building can be spotted from multiple points at North Bridge but with no obvious means of reaching the place. (Tip: head to the rear platforms behind the M&S, stick to the left, look for a footbridge). Well worth the attempt, they always have free postcards of new exhibitions on gorgeous, thick card-stock – a boon for cash-strapped art tarts. Grab a couple, pop them on the mantelpiece, folk will think you a connoisseur and pay an extra quid for a posh bottle of wine when calling round.

As for the show itself, Iran Do Espírito Santo’s large scale tone painting takes up the entire wall surface of the main gallery on the second floor. It’s quite something. An exercise in minimalism, shades of white, grey and black paint have been mixed to form a blended transition in mathematically precise vertical stripes. Bathed in the dishwater-pale Edinburgh light leaking through the windows, the effect is of a corrugated surface; the fine line between tones creating the illusion of peak and trough. The limited palette builds from white through to tissue, dove, concrete, tippling into blue; Air Force, Prussian, purple: aubergine, plum, to blackberry, inkwell, a starless night.

The sensation of cleansing and de-cluttering, of combining basic ingredients to create an omelette of aesthetic purity, continues with a small series of sculptural works by the same artist. Of these Water Glass 2 is utterly mesmeric. Worked crystal, it appears to be just that, a glass of water, impeccably tooled to give the appearance of liquid held by cooled molten sand and silica. There are no air bubbles, viewing from different angles causes the glass to appear first empty, then full, then half-drained. It is an idea reduced, uncomplicated and undeniably beautiful.

My other heart-want lurch of the EAF programme was Julie Robert’s exhibition Child at Talbot Rice. Her carefully orchestrated painting style, here realised in a new series of children’s portraits both posed and at play, squeezes colour in thick streaks like rainbow toothpaste. Glances of light, dappled shadow and nuance of texture are abstracted in the form of detailed patterns and a paint-by-numbers approach. Despite the jigsaw effect of a shattered bus-stop, the subjects retain their humanity… albeit sutured together, whole but sliced apart like a butcher shop poster detailing the cuts of a cow.

Leafing through the catalogues of past series on display, this comparison adopts greater relevance as Robert’s earlier work includes the ripped and torn bodies of Jack the Ripper’s victims, glistening with exposed, bulbous organs and shredded flesh, a vintage picture-book peek of a dark and adult play. That her distinct signature can step between innocence and experience yet offer a fresh perspective upon changing obsessions, from medical apparatus to porcelain pastoral ornaments, suggests that her technique has become a powerful voice, with timbre, pitch and resonance. Only the story changes.