Two artists with very different approaches converge in Gayfield Creative Spaces this week.
Marcus Oakley’s show Crunchy Pump is an ebullient celebration of colour and confidence. He appears to look at the world with the unabashed curiosity of a child, revels in presenting what he sees with that kind of fearless certainty we often lose in the transition into adulthood.
As the exhibition notes put it:
Blending retrospective and contemporary influences to generate 3D objects in cardboard, as well as collage and paintings, the humble line once again comes under scrutiny – deceptively simple, occasionally lazy, periodically complex and sometimes scratchy but ultimately, forever entertaining.
Once one gets over the surprise at so much apparent spontaneity, there’s considerable subtlety on show here, and humour.
This is a good-natured and cheering exhibition – perfect for a sunny spring day.
More subdued and contemplative in tone is William Lindsay’s Passing Places.
Lindsay worked for many years as a palaeontologist, patiently, meticulously seeking to establish fossilised forms long ago squashed or folded out of shape in the immediate aftermath of death.
The forms Lindsay uses in his paintings are not particularly important – ovals, rounded rectangles, vessels, lines, boat shapes, possibly clouds. They appear as the medium is stroked, drawn, spread, washed; they are the archetypes used to make a painting.
This fascination for line, and for the ambiguous, inchoate and unresolved relationships between forms is central to his work.
Lindsay is interested in what we truly see at the very moment of seeing, before we start to reshape it with clumsy explanations and the baggage of experience.
In this deliberate self-denial, this search for sensory innocence, his work is very similar to that of Oakley in the room next door. I heartily recommend it.—AM
Crunchy Pump and Passing Places continue at Gayfield Creative Spaces (11 Gayfield Square) until Thursday 21 April (12pm–6pm). Free.
