"All Enquiries" by Alasdair Wallace
The Open Eye Gallery presents a captivating exhibition that transcends the ordinary into realms of mystery and contemplation with works that are characterised by very controlled composition combined with an unusual density and richness of colour that Wallace calls “landscape inventions”.
Wallace's artistic journey is one marked by a deep engagement with the interplay between urban landscapes and rural outskirts. Trained at Glasgow School of Art, his works reflect a nuanced understanding of the liminal spaces between city and countryside.
'My paintings are produced in an intuitive process of invention, oblique observation and memory. There is a constant accumulation of the absurd, of everyday places, objects and ideas which snag my vision [Alasdair Wallace].” Employing a visual vocabulary which Wallace has honed over many years he produces images that have an emblematic quality but retain a high level of ambiguity in the hope that the works convey a real sense of personal experience. The work in this show mostly consists of smaller paintings of invented and observed objects. These evoke a sense of absurd icon, portent, baffling emblem or obscure iconography: crows, guitars, clouds, figures, vehicles, buildings, bones.
Wallace’s working practice is a lone, long, continuous and slow moving process. He always has various paintings underway at any one time. Wallace notes that “Some pieces can stall for years - until they 'make sense' again alongside new work. The process is reactive. The material of paint conjures itself in the shaping of images. There are plenty of quick tangents and capricious forays along the way but somehow everything eventually feeds back into this slow elliptical orbit of work.”
One cannot help but be drawn into Wallace's world, where the mundane becomes the extraordinary, and the familiar is tinged with a sense of the unknown. His paintings, rendered with exquisite detail and texture, invite contemplation and reflection. From the whimsical to the poignant, each piece resonates with a quiet, yet profound, sense of humanity.
"Lum Guitar" by Alasdair Wallace
Beautifully painted in tiny dabs, the subtlety of imagery half disappearing into quiet layers. The items on the mantlepiece of “Lum Guitar” for instance - half in shadow or perhaps ghosts of a previous habitation, the bright blue modern guitar glowing out of the sooty shadows with it’s broken string and reflection-less mirror perhaps reminding us of fruitless dreams of advancement through talent and hard work - an analogy of the splintered and broken society that we find ourselves in again.
"The invention of the electric guitar" by Alasdair Wallace
Small, and beautifully crafted Acrylics in themselves, textured and detailed, the subtle surrealist imagery, like the frequent and ominous crows that appear stealth-like in the compositions and through the humorous titles of the pieces like “The invention of the electric guitar”, depicting a bizarre half guitar - half analogue telephone with a skull, a tree and moon in the background next to a depiction of a telecommunications mast - symbolic of the death of a tangible society in place of a digital one, perhaps?
Yet, amidst the melancholy, there is also a sense of humour and resilience. Wallace's paintings, with their whimsical titles and playful compositions, invite viewers to find joy in the absurdities of life. From ominous crows to surreal hybrid objects, each painting offers a glimpse into a world that is at once strange and familiar.
Despite the obvious, yet not overly-sentimental or even cynical, pathos I found myself smiling more and more broadly as I walked round the exhibition and left with a sense of belonging, of being more connected to an increasingly surreal world that makes less and less sense everyday.
Like a cross between Picasso and Magrite the tiny paintings contain a wealth of imagery and symbolism painted most beautifully and with the utmost skill which quietly asks us to re-examine the world in which we live. This exhibition is a feast for the eyes and the soul and is a great way to encounter the works of this very interesting artist.
"All Enquiries" runs until the 27th of April at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. Admission is free.
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