SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY May 3rd 1998

Take eight Old Masters and painstakingly mix them with an array of 20th-century kitsch. Calum Colvin did, and lain Gale applauds his achievment.

'Is Nothing Sacred?' The National Gallery of Scotland, that exquisite pseudo-Parthenon on the Mound in Edinburgh,is a temple of art, and every day at 10am the faithful gather at its portals to make their devotions. Like any place of worship, it is variously a haven of spiritual calm, a place of intellectual stimulation and a place of awe. Particularly in its current ebullient, pseudo-Victorian splendour, the moment you set foot inside you are reminded that the art on the walls is here to be revered. It is a quirk of the logical late 20th century that we tend to accord these objects an almost mystical respect. Not three miles from the gallery's blessed halls, however, the ultimate sacrilege has been committed. The heretic is Calum Colvin, who, for his latest exhibition, under the auspices of the National Galleries themselves, in the annexe of the National Gallery of Modern Art has manipulated eight of the Mound's key works in a way which many art lovers are sure to find blasphemous. Not for nothing is the show entitled Sacred and Profane.
Colvin was the young turk who, along with Steven Campbell, David Mach, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Ken Currie, did so much to shake up Scottish artistic sensibilities in the mid Eighties. In the groundbreaking Vigorous Imagination exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, his work displayed a sound knowledge of art history, coupled with a style which combined the bitter humour of surrealism with the legacy of pop. Taking as his models the paintings of Ingres, Botticelli and Bosch, Colvin created a unique form of photomontage. Building a room-set styled in the manner of a lower middle-class Scottish interior - from formica tables and standard lamps to the vacuous popular novel and the trappings of shortbread-tin tartanry - Colvin conjured up a popular vision of 20th-century Scotland. Over this three-dimensional construction he would then paint a two-dimensional paraphrase of his chosen painting. The result was then photographed in brilliant colour and blown up. Since then Colvin has flirted with other photographic techniques - notably with computer manipulation. But he has always remained essentially sardonic; and, as the current show demonstrates, he has not lost his touch. Stand away from these works and they appear as two-dimensional line drawings of familiar images - The Three Graces, Titian's Diana and Actaeon, Rubens's Feast of Herod. Walk close though, and you will see the painstaking way in which Colvin has created this illusion, making his paint cross surfaces and boundaries, to move from carpet to sofa, up walls and over bookcases. The effect is at once disconcerting and engaging. It also prompts you to think about context, making you wish that the artist had been able to hang his work alongside the original paintings rather than mere photographs of them. But that would probably have rendered the National Gallery's director apoplectic (either that, or it was just too close to pastiche for Colvin himself). It helps, before going to this show, to visit the Mound and examine Colvin's models in their existing context. Here you predictably luxuriate in their painterliness, their iconography and the extraordinary way in which, in the finest instances (Titian, Rubens, Elsheimer), the two come together in a perfect fusion of form and function. Yet, as you gaze at the Old Masters, it is hard to escape a sense of creeping submission to the will of the museum. Hand in hand with your veneration goes a tacit understanding that when you return to the real world, they will remain museum pieces - creatures of the past, without relevance to contemporary life. Colvin's triumph is to have reclaimed these apparently dusty objects for the late 20th century. His apparent blasphemy is their resurrection as he opens our eyes to the universality of the old masters. It is not by chance that his figures twine around the very fabric of his room-sets. The implication is that their personae are locked within the human psyche, as deeply embedded in the spirit of the post-modern world as the geegaws with which they share house room. Thus Venus is painted across the drawers and mirror of a dressing table and Diana the huntress becomes a languid housewife, her attendant nymphs like so many bimbos at some weird, nude, suburban coffee morning. Her bower is hung, not with swags of velveteen but with the trappings of our own baroque age - Madonna and Club 18-30 T-shirts. Actaeon shields himself, not from the stag's skull, symbol of his ultimate transformation and death, but from its post-modern equivalent. His punishment for the crime of pornographic voyeurism is to be fettered to an ironing board. It's a cunning piece of post-feminist visual rhetoric.
Now, there's nothing in any of the above to alarm the men of the Mound. But, on a deeper level, Colvin's new works may have re-opened a very unwelcome can of worms. It is the artist's take on the Three Graces which reveals a paradoxical subtext of this show. Painted over a mock-up of a hospital room, the image prompts, on one level, obvious thoughts about the poignant narcissism of old age and the consolation of false gods. But this memento mori has more to offer. Although Canova's much-vaunted sculpture has only a peripheral historical connection to Scotland and is, in terms of the Titians and the Rubens, a minor work, its acquisition was nevertheless the focus of considerable effort and no little expense. Seen here, transfigured by the juxtaposition of a commonplace of contemporary Scottish life, it now appears to offer quite another level of interpretation. Colvin's show may have opened our eyes to learning new lessons from old masters but, ironically - and possibly without the artists deliberate intent - it also questions to what extent the National Gallery of Scotland should continue to devote its grandest rooms and keenest acquisitions policy to the work of such artists at the expense of those of its native land.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Belford Road, Edinburgh. To June 28.

SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 17th August 1997 by Ian Gale 'Sun Block'

Calum Colvin's exploration of the holiday paints a thin line between heaven and hell.

THE great British package holiday. It's a terrifying thought. Acres of Spanish beach stuffed to bursting with scantily-clad people hell-bent on having fun. And hell is precisely what Calum Colvin's latest work, which takes as its starting point just this sort of holiday In the sun, is all about. Colvin Is fascinated by how one man's heaven can be another man's hell. To demonstrate, he offers us a ribbon of consciousness, twisting away from the familiar sight of lobster-pink, oil-drenched bodies into a ghastly dreamscape - a nightmare ride from the supposedly safe haven of the Costa del Sol to the unthinkable. For the ultimate destination of this magical mystery tour is a charnel house; a place of corporeal decay. Such surreal images are nothing new to Colvin's work.This time though the idea works particularly well on account of his new technique - digitally distorting the picture so that the thought bubble of this questionable modern Parnasslan Idyll appears to be sucked through a series of small spaces cut into the pillars which punctuate a model of a desert wasteland inhabited by typical Colvin creations: toy figures, a model stag, a disembodied hand, a serpent .FinalIy, distorted out of all recognition into an apparently liquid mass - a shiny slick of mercury - the holiday Image merely subsides Into a pool of unpleasant green slime.
This is a post-apocalyptic vision worthy of Bosch or Ernst .At the same time though, it is a narrative In the best tradition of the old master allegory and the epic poem .That its inspiration was a punchy moral treatise by the 17th-centuryJesuit Athanaslus Kircher-The Subterranean World - should come as no surprise. His message was of the delusion of alchemical transformation and Colvin Is also concerned with the way in which we delude ourselves into notions of an earthly paradise. More succinctly, he presents a metaphorical joumey very much in the vein of Dante's Divine Comedy, which perhaps closer to home can be seen as a memento mori, reflecting a spectfically Scottish Calvinistic awareness of an Impending fiery pit.
These are powerful photographic pieces which which deserve the same attention accorded Jeff Wall's monumental back-lit cibachromes and it is unfortunate that the Portfolio, while inspired In showing this work, is effectively too small a space in which to truly appreciate it. Perhaps an increase in public funding would allow a move to larger premises. For the present, however, it is worth visitng Colvin's new show if only for a timely reminder amidst festival and holiday excesses, of the fate which ultimately awaits us all .
Portfolio Gallery Candlemaker Row. To 30 Aug, and 2-20 Sept.

IMPRESIONES - BRITISH COUNCIL MAGAZINE, SPAIN Spring 98 Photography, Art and New Technologies (From Tomorrow Photography is Dead)

Photography is unique amongst art forms, as it is a medium that almost everybody has some experience of. We all take photos, from the everyday 'snapshot' to the considered recording of an important event, to the creation of a unique (if reproducable) artwork. The democracy of photography is all pervasive. The present time is an interesting period to be involved in the creation of photographic images. As we move rapidly towards the next century the technical innovations that increasingly merge the process of photography with the interface of the computer will inevitably lead to a complete re-evaluation of the way we consider photography. One of the most important changes we will see in the creation of photographic images will be the demise of film as the method of recording what the camera sees, or film as the conduit between the camera and the print. Increasingly cameras will record visual informat ion digitally, the computer will be the conduit between the camera and the print. The image will be viewed on a computer screen before it is printed. Computer software will enable this process. This same software has the ability to fundamentally alter the reality of the image.It may well become common to manipulate images on an everyday basis. People are often disappointed when they get their holiday snaps back from the chemist. The image is out of focus, peoples eyes are red ,their skin pale and bleached out.We know (or think we know) that we dont really look like that. Maybe I can just alter the colour here, change the background.....etc. These options do not, for the most part, exist with film. We believe what we see to be more or less true.If we dont like what we see we declare the image to be a bad photograph, which we discard or put to the bottom of the pile.The images we like we treasure, carry them around with us ,or frame them to hang on our wall. These become markers on our journey of life, they measure time. In the (near) future this may well change. We will never be so sure of the integrity of the image as a document rooted in a definite time in our history.The impassive nature of photography will be gone.What we see may or may not have happened. The telling details in the image could, for all we know, be completely artificial. Is all this a bad thing? Is photography dying? I think that it is both good and bad. The documentary aspect of photography was always a dubious one.The all pervasiveness of the photographic image (books, magazines, adverts, snapshots) has left us visually sated. Frequently we look, but we dont see, our eyes being overloaded with information. In the future we may look differently.Perhaps we will be forced to think about photography more, did this event really happen? Does this person really look like this? We will look for evidence of manipulation, and this is the crux. Perhaps New Technology will provide us with the opportunity to re-engage with Photography, to truly understand how unique a medium it is.
CALUM COLVIN.

THE SCOTSMAN FESTIVAL SUPPLEMENT Friday 15th August 1997 'Galleries Pick of the Day'

Sometimes hearing the story or meaning of a painting from the artist explains the intrigue away. Not so with Calum Colvin's extraordinary, Pseudologica Fantastica. Trained as a sculptor, Colvin now combines two and three dimensional elements in his works. The striking 'Mundus Subterraneus I', is part studio-constructed still life, part photographic and part computer manipulated images. Dark and surreal, each section holds a story - the snakeskins, coiled and dessicated, discarded in the foreground belonged to the artist's brother, the distorted images of the cranium are the happy holiday snaps which seep into almost every piece in this show. Moving from picture to picture the viewer is drawn to linger on these strange melting images,dissolving and solidifying at intervals, spreading and moving across the works. The preoccupation of the whole is the Renaissance concerns with the discovery of the universal laws, of astrology and alchemy- the beginnings of scientific thought melded together with contemporary references to technology and quick- witted cultural observations. Look closely at the extended 'hand,' of 'Mundus Subterraneus lIl,' and its origins as a typewriter become apparent. Raised from the knuckles are the keys, 'H-A-T-E' and 'L-O-V-E', a similar 'tattoo' can be found on the truncated arm,in the form of a pottery swallow.But most redolent of the wit and thought with which these works are saturated , most stunning in its first illusions of simplicity is 'Mundus Subterraneus IV'. The repeated image of the screen, glowing like a gem-stone, is part of a dismantled television. workings plugged into a philosopher figurine - our individual conscious, or soul speakers connected to a blow-up heart, the images on the screens are a sly take on establishment notions of the nation's viewing. Regardless of what is on offer, he implies, most people want to watch horse-racing and porn. A wise man indeed then, to include both in his art.
Pseudologica Fantastica, Portfolio Gallery, 43 Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh. Tuesday - Saturday 12pm-5.30pm. Admission £1 (50p). Laura Collins

THE SCOTSMAN Monday 10th May 1993 'Action men to the fore'

Murdo Macdonald reviews Douglas Gordon's Tramway exhibition a highlight of Mayfest which explores cultural reality, and Calum Colvin's latest work at the Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh, which casts an eye on Scottish identity.

In his show at the Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh, Calum Colvin continues to explore the anatomy of stereotypes and realities with which he has engaged so successfully in earlier work. In The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things he marries a tradition of Christian iconography (which owes much to the Divine Comedy of Dante on the one hand and to the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch on the other) with an ironic illumination of tartanry and kitsch. Where this work differs markedly from what he has previously done is in its technique. Colvin has moved from perceptual paradox in which painting, construction and photography all play a part, to the purity of illusion and image made possible by computer-manipulation of images. In an interview with Jim Lawson which appears in the current issue of Portfolio Magazine, Colvin makes a revealing comment: "The computer interests me because it is a vast library. Images can be placed in a computer and then called, up at random.It has a huge memory. I saw an engraving once called The Art of Memory, by Robert Fludd. Fludd conceived a theatre. There are doors off, and one goes in and places thoughts at determinate locations, so that one can retrieve them later. The computer is similar." This quotation, linking as it does the computer and alchemical thought (the latter an area of great significance in Colvin's work) is an indication of the appropriateness of the computer as a medium for Colvin. The theatre of memory is, for Colvin, both a metaphor for the computer and a source of inspiration for his imagery. Within this structure he explores his own cultural identity through symbols of loss and distortion ranging (in, for example, Anger) from a kilted Action Man to the shadowy presence of James Loch of Sutherland's Highland Clearance infamy. Campbell's soup tins and McDonald's burger wrappers conjure up resonances of multinational (in both senses) Scots diaspora. It is this kind of tension of concept and image that gives Colvin's work its force. However, the perfection possible with computer-manipulation of images, while fascinating in its own right, lacks an aspect which Colvin achieved in early work through the obviously-illusory quality of painted and constructed work. Here we are presented with a new reality, not one that both joins and conflicts with our own. So there are losses as well as gains here. Having said that, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things is an impressive body of work.

THE TWO WAYS OF LIFE Catalogue text
by David Alan Mellor, May 1991

Calum Colvin's The Two Ways of Life is a recent addition - but a perverse one - to a long series modernising that commonplace of Renaissance iconography, The Choice of Hercules. Like O.G.Rejlander's version of this topic in 1857, Colvin has assembled a vast multi-part photographic tableau. But while in those previous handlings by Hogarth and Rejlander there was a confirmation of high moral seriousness and of Virtue against Vice, Colvin has thought otherwise. Instead he has upset the moral fixities of Industry and Idleness, of Virtue and Vice by way of a turbulent narrative, an amphigouri. a sea of nonsense across which a fantastic voyage is undertaken by the manniken toy-hero of his previous photo-tableaux. The Ship of Fools, the Narrenschif, is the carnival,metaphor by which Colvin satirises his chosen framework of Humanist idealism. This ship sets sail in the first picture in the Two Ways of Life suite, The Empty Universe, and ”it then journeys on through all the other panels, by way of the moral geography of rocks and grottoes and wrecks .
The Empty Universe Is he Ulysses, the Fisher King or a young guy from Dundee on a Benidorn package holiday, who stands kilted, ready to embark? Colvin has always been marked by this Eliotic, Waste Land-ish melancholy. However much it works against the register, this is still a High-Romantic picture, resembling Turner's Parting of Hero and Leander; full of bravura vapours and spray, a moonlit Cling Film (TM Copyright) sea with a beach party in progress and an adventurous - perhaps fatal - return to homeland in the offing. The drunken boat bearing a sail blazoned with Robert Burns' Highland anthems to lechery approaches the Barbary coast in this prologue or overture. Such unheard - to the beholder of the tableau Scottish songs, complement the uniformed bagpipers and drummers who mutely cross the map of Scotland and into a skewed map of England in . . .
Siren Colvin unsettles the conventional meanings of the female personification of Vice within his parasitised allegory. In Rejlander's 1857 picture the Sirens call and detain a heeding youth falling on the 'wrong' way of life. Here Tintoretto's Susannah is ironically used by Colvin to dismantle the notion of the temptress; Susannah is a type of purity and innocence - a triumphal figure who rejects the sexual advances of the Elders - reversing the signification of Siren and the roles attached to it. It fits, then, that this image of dissimulation against type, is composed anamorphically, a cryptic double of body and music making still-life, which generates chaste melodies, disdaining the rout of Scots bandsmen on the rocks below her right foot. An object of the voyeurs gaze of the Elders and the kited toy hero in his erotic craft, she is their nemesis and ruin. Like the virtuous Elizabeth I in the Armada portrait, she stands as a rock while a storm devours the importuning, hostile boats arou mnd her.
His Hand in Mine Shipwrecked, the horn boat has foundered in the chambers of a malign Poseidon, while the Action-Man hero peers in on the scene with his camera. Aground in Davy Jones' Locker with its textual sail torn from the mast, the fool's ship with its announcement of questing male desire now resembles a temporary crucifix in penitential hands: asceticism (rather than codified 'vice' - another handy dandy switch by Colvin) is in the ascendence. Just as it was in Picasso's Blue Period, aptly described by Apollinaire as: ". . . acquatic painting, blue like the damp bottom of an abyss and inspiring pit". This submarine defile corresponds to those sacralised spaces and temples that Colvin has built in such earlier pictures as Cenotaph (1987). So Elvis presides with a look from the depths for those in peril on the sea, an almost demonaic antetype, a false idol cast into the deeps, now made amphibious by Colvin, inhabiting the worlds of water and air.
The Two Ways of Life Near drowned, the toy sailor has toppled over a wall into a bizarre spectacle resembling the Hall of the Mountain King. The Christian narrative is continued in this central panel which has its counterpart in Rejlander's guiding patriarch at the dividing point of the 'two ways'. Colvin had earlier thought of painting Moses parting the Red Sea; he concluded with a version of Raphael's St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, his absent reed cross referring to the lashed cruciform mast of the Narrenschif in the previous panel. What does St. John preach in this context which Colvin has abducted him to? At least three topics have structured the suite and they are laid out here in Baroque splendour. The first is the confiscated culture of 'Scottishness': the shrine behind St. John is a kind of Highland reliquary composed of stags bones and antlers, the bagpipes and the heraldic chart of the Scots clans, Jokanaan in the milieu of a fusty Highland lodge. Secondly. the conventional nobility of High Renaissance art is desacralised here, as it is in the use of Michelangelo's Bacchus in the sixth panel of the suite, and in the pop-up book display of Leonardo painting. This confronts a similar cardboard pop-up vision of Elvis at Las Vegas, his voice, like that of St. John, crying in the wilderness. A semi-deified Elvis forms a final strand of meaning in this panel - an Elvis also of two ways, signified in the change of his career after his entry into the US Army, cited by Colvin as 'Golden Boy/Soldier Boy', in the shadow of the boy preacher St. John. This combination is powerfully reminiscent of Max Ernst's mutations of Christian iconography in the early nineteen-twenties.
Crying in the Chapel Together with His Hand in Mine, in Crying in the Chapel Elvis flanks the high altar and shrine of the central panel, his face found in what amounts to two transept chapels dedicated to his cult. But there are differences: instead of the cold submarine light of His Hand. . ., in this instance, (as in all the panels to the right hand side) some notional sunlight falls into a crypt space where the sailor, fetched up on pebbles. listens to the music of the sirens, but (Eliotically, again) on an archaic phonograph. He shields his eyes from an angelic vision rather than the mortifying skeleton's dance in His Hand .... In a mirror at the far end the beholder comes under Elvis' gaze, while gilded angels hover about a ladder. The vision, of course, cites Jacob's Dream, but it drastically shifts the revelation of the House of God to a mournful secular site; that of Scotland dispossessed. This is discovered in the burning light of the wreath the angels hold; a row of Highland cottages under a mountain, inverted, indistinct, is compressed like the toy crystal snow sphere in Citizen Kane, into an always already lost souvenir of Scotland. This had been previously glimpsed in the central panel as a political cartoon from the late nineteenth century, showing rows of tombstones as the only assured pieces of land and property the Highland Scots had claim to. This Jacob's Dream is soured, fatalistic.
Bacchus And now we climb out of the abysses. This, remember, should be the traditional realm of virtue, a glimpse of paradise hardworn after surmounting the rocks and caverns. Conventionally so, but Colvin has subverted this usual patterning by representing a banalised peaceable kingdom with kitsch china tigers and dogs, presided over by Dionysus-personification of excess and disorder- rather than figuring Apollo's harmonic golden age. This is no Parnassian scene but, in Colvin's words, "a corrupted Garden of Eden, with Bacchus intoxicated with self righteousness . . . a siren of male desire. In Bacchus the image of innocence found in Susannah as the Siren. is taken up and perverted". In other words, we might view Bacchus and Siren as inverted pairings which function like His Hand. . . and Crying in the Chapel, to undermine the prior iconographic schemas of Vice and Virtue. Yet Colvin does strongly moralise here, with a vast simplicity, both politically and ecologically; Bacchus, travestying the figures of Industry, depletes the resources of a sagging globe, syphoning them via his puncturing horn of plenty into another distended, bloated world; a Bacchus who, like the early Nineteenth century Scottish Calvinist writer James Hogg, is "a justified sinner".
With the Great Plenipotentiary On the right hand edge of Bacchus the kilted toy sailor has regained his ship from a Van Gogh sea. The story. a harsh lesson for one setting out in the Narrenschif, seems wound up and at an end. On his sail is the printed conclusion to a Scottish fairy tale: the wandering hero has learned how to play the bagpipes and the reality principle is upheld. A certain neutering has taken place. However, there is still the final panel, a panel which recapitulates and pairs with the first, The Empty Universe. The sailor reappears, flailing the water as desperately as Burt Lancaster across the suburban lawns of The Swimmer. This epilogue picture - Colvin prefers to see it as the final shot of a pirate movie as the credits roll entails a reflux of desire. Burns' found lyric of Highland eroticism. 'The Great Plenipotentiary', from The Merry Muses of Caledonia, is reinscribed into this declining world. On a glassy, amber sea, a galleon surges by, its sails full of manic hope, flying a chorus line from Burns' poem as its mainmast flag.
DAVID ALAN MELLOR University of Sussex

THE INDEPENDENT Wednesday 16 March 1988

Philip Core discusses the witty visual illusions of Calum Colvin Unnatural perspectives

IN HANS Holbein's well-known painting The Ambassadors in the National Gallery, a memento mori crosses the bottom of the picture in the oddly elongated shape of a large skull. The distortion which makes it visible in correct proportion from only one point of view is called Anamorphosis. This method of drawing, which relies on copying an image by means of a distorted grid based on one viewpoint, is also the method used by Dutch 17th-century artists for the optical cabinets which still mystify and enchant. In fact, Anamorphosis, though laborious, can project any image across any surface (it was developed for ceiling frescoes). "Projection" is the interesting aspect of the operation; it seems to have taken three hundred years to evolve a really personal use for this essentially reproductive trick; Calum Colvin has done it.
Or, to be more accurate, he is in the process of doing it. His large Cibachrome photographic prints contain images from the Museum "Greats" (Michelangelo's Bound Slave, Botticelli's Venus, etc.) which he has painted in anamorphic distortion across deep and cluttered roomscapes. When photographed from one viewpont, the familiar image defeats the tables, chairs and accumulated kitsch junk across which it is drawn, giving us a transcription of a masterpiece textured and fragmented by its "ground".
This is a complicated undertaking as you may easily appreciate by pointing a slide projector at a room full of ordinary bits and pieces and imagining how to trace the outline of whatever image you throw out. The same experiment will also help you understand that Calum Colvin started out as a sculptor. While the finished product seems to emerge from a block, the first stages of a sculpture involve a drawing going around the comers of a lump of stone; this, too is anamorphosis; Colvin has turned sculpture inside-out.
He has done this in a manner which is funny, elaborate and very colourful. Not , perhaps, since Pozzo's famous anamorphic ceiling in S. Ignazio in Rome, has such flamboyant vulgarity fooled the eye so beguilingly. However, like the fresco, Colvin's images suffer from the fussiness and lack of intellectual complexity which contradict the care and finish of his craftmanship. The tiny plastic figures (many in kilts, this is an unregenerate and charming Scot at work) 1960s three-piece suites, plaster statuettes which form his "canvas" are only mildly suggestive.
Though a careful placement of the Venus de Milo (which causes her missing head to replace the genitals of the Bound Slave) is very witty, the crude painting of the borrowed images does not use this wonderful technique to its full advantage. The problem with so much photography is the slick, cold surface of the print itself, which- makes the chill polish of 19th-century academic painting look lush by comparison. Colvin has depicted both texture and flatness simultaneously but the actual sets with the images painted over them are probably more exciting on their own than the completed photograph.
When Colvin's work is contrasted with the photographs by Ewan Fraser, with whom he shares the show, his immense originality is clear at once. Fraser combines the tastes and techniques of Jean-Marc Pouveur and Joel Witkin in elegant but unmemorable icons. Colvin has made a stylistic step forward for his art, with wit and competence.
If it proves possible to print photographs across heaps of 3-D objects, or to print them across curved vaults or sculpture then Colvin may make an even more important contribution to the history of photography.
The drawback of such images is the same one from which painters have tried to free themselves for so many years: the tyranny of one-point perspective.In Colvins case, the single viewpoint is the problem in reverse we cannot enjoy the distorted imap as we do with Holbein's grotesque skull before it snaps into correct format, because the camera "sees" from a fixed point. Such a dilemma suggests that Colvin is only at the beginning of his work in this area. His natural flair for decoration (the objects in the "sets" for his photographs must be seen to be believed) could well develop into a one-dimensional pop video joke. Film, with its moveable viewpoint, could offer a further development for an artist who would be wasting his time manufacturing joke postcards.
Man Ray made experiments with filming images, or the shadows of objects falling on other objects; Abel Gance showed an awareness of anamorphic distortion in his cinema techniques; what has no precedent is anamorphic sculpture. This is the area suggested by these pictures and Colvin's prize-winning sculptor's training.
The classical references in the photographs familiar languishing nudes, goddesses and warriors are being laughed at, but loved. They bring the greatest achievements of the art of painting into an operation which depends on the camera. This is a contradiction which makes you wonder if you would like to live with one of Colvin's photographs; like the distortions viewable in corrective mirrors, which were the favourite toys of 17th-century Europe, his painting suffers from being at such variance with the originals. Perhaps this is an area where the camera should be used more rather than less.
If you do decide to buy one of Colvin's prints, they are still very fairly priced for huge colour works; not for much longer, I would think.
While painting has recently readmitted the figurative and gestural to its armoury, the associated knowledge of perspective and illusion has sadly not made a fashionable comeback. These skills, which all ultimately derive from Alberti's experiments during the Italian Renaissance, seemed to have been lost. In fact, they were the principles by which, first, Durer's drawing "window", then the camera obscura, and finally film and cine cameras were developed.
In that sense, Colvin's preoccupation with the great works of the Old Masters is a valid and perceptive element of his new perspective. When he looks for subject matter of his own, and indulges the classical aesthetic so self-disparagingly mocked in his current pieces then he may well be a Young Master. Photography's first.
The exhibition of photographs by Calum Colvin and Ewan Fraser continues until 26 March at the Richard Pomeroy Gallery, c/o Jacob Street Studios, Mill Street, London, SEI 2BA.

ARTS REVIEW Calum Colvin: New Work at Salama-Caro Gallery Francis Hodgson

If the content of his work were less interesting than it is, Calum Colvin's technique would still be fascinating. There is a quality of near madness to the constant interweaving of pictoral levels that he makes and then photographs which is itself very seductive. No surface can be trusted, no frame completely encloses its subject, except the slick shiny surface of his pictures and the actual edge of the photographic paper. For those who have never seen them, Colvin's pictures are constructions designed to be visible only from the Cyclopean angle of the lens. Like huge self-enveloping puns, the figures are never quite wholly themselves; on the odd occasions when they are, a mirror will throw back a reflection of them as they are not. Colvin is a consummate painter as well as a sculptor, but his work remains photographic at root because he is still tackling our ingrained difficulty in believing that a photograph can show us that which we cannot see. Colvin's sphere is close to that of Duane Michals, a world in which the only solid points of reference are the photographer's humour and our shared photographic culture.
Colvin creates mayhem, but it is not a mayhem totally without order. He offers his viewers a Babel of iconography - indeed one of the amusements to be harvested from this always witty exhibition is in seeing which landmarks he has made his own - but his procedures are utterly coherent. He works by strong themes which help the viewer to keep his balance in the shifting tides of Colvins working on his imagination. So, for example he offers his own poetically licensed autobiography as a constant reference for us to take progressively more distant bearings. There are self-portraits everywhere in Colvin's work, not only as the central figure in Minotaur, notable by his absence in the second panel of the diptych (Colvin had earlier made himself the central figure of a triptych, in the 1987 Garden of Earthly Delights), but in the kilted Action-Man who struggles through the pictures like John Bunyan's Christian, in the snapshots of Colvin taped to the easels in the side panels of the triptych Deaf Man's Villa, and in the recurring Scots urchin with his earthy good sense who comes out of the cartoon culture which Colvin uses both as leavening and as signposting.
It is not autobiographical work in the sense that a novel might be, but we can understand that Colvin is photographing the difficulties of the artist from his own identifiable point of view. The welter of allusions is one which we are welcome to make what we can, but they arc clearly one person's gleanings from the vastness of the culture available to modern man. And what a gleaner. Colvin is as happy using fancy literary references as soap-opera, tourist-resort souvenirs as Classical antiquities. Icarus falls into a set of bagpipes, while St.Anthony gazes at a lunatic procession of garden gnomes. Colvin has always made his installations from a skip-scavenger's motley of bits-and-pieces; but now it is ciear that he regards culture the same way. The fantastic range of Colvin's references is fully in harmony with the thrust of his work. He quotes (his pictures are very often full of words, actual words cut out or propped into the picture space like a Jazz-singer's commentary on himself woven into the texture of the song) Shelley and Wittgenstein and nursery-books and medical treatises knowing that their depth is as illusory to most of his viewers as the perspective of his pictures. Everything mocks everything else in Colvin's best work, and yet the seriousness is there for all who have eyes to see. Part of his mastery is to have understood that the kitsch he has always used in objects, can also be seen in ideas.
There are some new technical conquests in this new work, too. notably Colvin's discovery of his control over the difference between exterior and interior. He used to install his world firmly inside, with an occasional window to look out. Now even the normal divisions of space are fit subjects for his punning distortion. In the great central panel of Deaf Man's Villa, the Little Boy Blue sits on a pedestal of pure forest air, sculpted into a pillar. His trumpet-cum-paintbrush blows/plays a swathe around the outside of a celestial sphere so that we see him outside outer space. The same figure rises from a palette like a genie from a bottle, perhaps the best painted of all Colvin's magnificent ghosts. He is clearly there and equally clearly not, as real as a dream, the magical culmination of Colvin's work to date.
There are things in this show which Colvin has made as fine as you will ever see. That central panel of Deaf Man's Villa is one. So is the left-hand panel of Minotaur. His Venus of the gogglebox or posterhoarding is not far behind. But there is also a disappointment. Colvin was commissioned by the Photographers' Gallery to try his hand at computer-generated imagery, and two of the resulting images are included here. For long-term Colvinologists they are interesting in that the hitherto always marginal Action-Man has become the central figure at last, climbing boldly to Heaven on Jacob's Ladder before tumbling helplessly as Icarus. But Colvin has defeated the computer. Instead of allowing him even more labyrinthine virtuosity with the picture-space, it has reduced him to a flat ground. evenly lit. The wit of his established practice whereby the only correct place from which to see is that where he places his lens (which makes, of course, every viewer of the finished work see it from that right place) Is completely lost. The computer, having no Iens, fails to see Cyclopically and Colvin becomes in these two pieces a cathedral organist blowing a penny whistle .
The two computer-assisted pictures show the brilliance of the other work, but they also reveal clearly how Colvin uses light. It does not define his complex spaces; that is done by the three working dimensions of his construction and the two of his paint. His light is more like a film cameraman's, varied from picture to picture or within large blocks within pictures defined by the subject to give mood. His figures, being painted across the asperities of surfaces other than their own, show the shading of their supports rather than their own. Where they do have shadows, we may be sure it is another illusion.
But Colvin is not merely a prankster. Often very witty, these pictures are not cartoons. Seen together (and these are pictures which ask to be seen together by the way many of their components recur throughout Colvin's work) they present a glorious panorama of what it means to be an artist in this day and age. Deaf and surrounded by Babel, earth-bound and reaching for the sky, it is hard not to think that Colvin is telling of that which he knows. Which is reason enough to be grateful. (to end Sept)

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 23rd May 1986
New British Colour, Photographers Gallery, London - William Bishop

COLOUR vision did not evolve overnight and can be presumed to enhance perception when compared with black-and-white. For us it is natural to see in colour and more usual to paint in colour rather than in monochrome. Even ancient Greek sculptures were apparently colourfully painted. But what has this got to do with photography? Well even W. H. Fox Talbot, judging by his attitude, would have photographed in colour had he the technical means at his disposal. And that is the crucial point in this matter the technical means. While there are still reservations about the archival qualities of some colour materials, the technical means for consistent colour quality exist and have done so for years, and improvements are being continually made. As everyone knows, colour has already established priority in certain photographic areas, but not until quite recently has the 'independent' photographic community been so open-armed to embrace colour. The colour exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery and staying on show there until 28 June therefore, are an early British celebration of the state of play of serious progressive work from a selected few workers in colour, who are representative of a small army of younger photographers; or as the exhibition organiser puts it: 'four artists who are making a significant contribution to the reevaluation of a colour aesthetic'. Three of these people, Peter Fraser, Ron O'Donnell and Stephen Lawson had examples of their work in the show, 'Image and Exploration' last summer, but not enough to make any proper judgement of their work possible, and Calum Colvin is a new luminary originally from Glasgow and late of the RCA where he was a student of photography. Colvin's new work was commissioned for this exhibition, and a slim catalogue situates the work unde –r the title: Constructed Narratives. Constructed narratives are all the rage at the moment for some people, and in order to discern the thread of sensibility at work here we have to look both to America and back to thosc expansionist and heady sixties, which some of us remember, and at later so-called conceptual art (rememhcr the bricks?) where conception became dominant. The spirit of surrealism revived with help from The Beatles and Disney-colour gone-wild and now this agile spirit is fleshed-out before our very eyes in this exhibition in narrative guise. As is commonly known (among art historians) the classic surrealist situation has been described as 'the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table'. Such sit uations now are, of course old hat but nevertheless, Ron O'Donnell makes no secret that his inspiration comes from juxtapositions which create this surreal mood one of fantasy or dream which ambivalently relates to the everyday world. It is a telling fact that imagemaking (painting) was regarded by Plato as 'the dream for those who are awake' and what the surrealists did was to popularise the notion of the supremacy of the reality of the unconscious mind (the world of the dream), Leaving us today with the legacy of a greater awareness of the continuum between internal and external reality. O'Donnell explores this continuum by focusing on themes which lie at the twilight level of the consciousness of contemporary society whether he realises it or not, with th µemes such as the bomb, and the status of animals. He exploits the idea of theatrical stage-sets and builds in narrative to his one-off shots, or conversely, the juxtapositions give rise to narrative based on situation. He speaks of wanting to be an entertainer through his work, and the dramatic nature of this work in size, unexpected colour schemes and surprising juxtapositions advances this end. But entertainment is not the sole aim as those who feel the work will discover. His use of colour modulates the observer's feelings. Colour is important as it takes us at this unconscious level of the feelings and makes us adopt a certain attitude towards what is seen. As with sets for advertising, elements of the picture (particularly colour) can be carefully controlled, and taking the picture is a purely technical operation. O'Donnell's role is that of scene manager, like the still-life advertising photographer, where the camera becomes mere ly a convenient recording tool. To the purist, Peter Fraser's work might be more appealing. It is nearer to the photography that most of us know, or think that we do. Fraser does not manipulate the view before him to make it an obvious scene from an act of drama, but manoeuvres himself, and through framing, and sometimes additional light, receives onto his plate what happens to be there. The main ingredient necessary for successful work of this type is sensitive intelligence. His work is not the Sunday photographer's snapshot, but work which commands attention outside family relationship. These are works of culture rather than nature: cognition, or the ability to know, is at the heart of the pictures. But cognition is no single simple thing. It can be purely formal and yet still concrete; definite and yet difficult to articulate in words. It can be feeling. And that is where Peter Fraser's work links in with the mystical tradition within Britain. It is a mode of active perception which tries to see into appearances for symbolic and deeper meanings. His own inner world plays an active part in relating with the external visible world. The theme of his work here is the notion of the sacred. He tries to explore how things are rather than how they appear to be due to our hackneyed ways of looking and he seeks to discover how forces reveal themselves. His work can be taken as deeply religious if we take that to mean possessing rev Øerence and awe for that which is. Colour, in its effects, varies from picture to picture, and while each picture serves its part in a series, each has autonomous value. For example, 'Churchill' can be seen as a formal composition of steelblues which vibrate light in the manner of optical art and the straw as accentuating this by its complementary colour contrast. Besides this there is a contrast in temperature and texture, and form and colour contain power to evoke symbolic meanings. It is useful to know here that the images are titled according to location they are situated in the real external world as well as in the heart of Peter Fraser's perception. In 'Chew Magna', the word, 'God', is illuminated and an epiphany of light hovers above it, while the red " and blue have symbolic ecclesiastical meaning as has the cross in light and shade. The word magically makes visible to the mind, and light as a metaphor for God, manifests the visible. Here we have metaphysical poetry. 'The best works of art all contain poetry', wrote P. H. Emerson in 1890; an oldfashioned view, but one which has not been entirely abandoned. While the boundaries of sculpture have extended themselves in recent years and photography has come to have a vital documentary part in it, it is as a sculptor that I see Calum Colvin, but definitions begin to blur. Let's wait to see how the Tate Gallery classifies him. He has in fact been a student of sculpture at Dundee, but in his present commissioned work he is, to all appearances, an icon manipulator, which in terms of photography looks like collage. Titles are key clues to his pictures and elements in pictures contain iconographical references and resonances linked with these titled subjects. Manikins are present in most of these constructions and dates bearing Christmas-cracker mottoes from a tear-off calendar feature in the pictures. Without a lexicon, these pictures are hard to fathom, but that adds to their appeal; they will consequently have quite different meanings for different people. The conceptual work is clever and the colour and bold form reminiscent of stained glass windows and Van Gogh expressionist brushwork with his heavy black outlines. Colour is both descriptive and symbolic. There is an element of psychotic and brut art, which may be necessary to break through our closeted mental habits to present his insights. Though arrived at differently, there is something in common here with Peter Fraser's images. The common factor is the high proportion of the mind (the subjective world) that is involved and the strong sense of colour. Typical of Calum's manner of working is 'The Death of Venus'. As a myth, Venus has epic proportions, and his modern sensibility plays around this theme. The 'installation' is based on the head and shoulders portrait of Venus lifted from Botticelli's painting: 'The Birth of Venus' (to which visual reference is made). This becomes a landscape for diverse items which create spatial ambiguity and the blending of associations in which the title resonates. Texts also play their part in this visual performance, and the calendar motto in this case reads: 'The world may be your oyster, but you've got to crack the shell yourself.' How true. Well, 'Death of Venus' loss of innocence? A jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing? Or poetry to ponder? New to British photography anyway, and if you like this sort of thing, exciting . Stephen Lawson's work brings us back down to earth. The interest of his work is place and appearance in relation to duration and derives from a scientific inspiration. Lawson is a trained sculptor and wishes his work to speak beyond the phenomenal appearance and basic scientific attitude. In his way he is studying process (which is as real as a brick). He is playing accompanying fiddle (in a corridor) among these exhibitors, but his work does deserve serious appreciation. Unfortunately his largescale work does not reproduce well and is better seen directly. He reconstructs a scene (from the real external world) in strips, like a Õ'joiner', so there is continuity of image but each strip represents a different time and hence, light-value, or even seasonal difference depending on time scale. Colour carries useful informational value here. So what conclusion can be drawn from this exhibition about the use of colour by Independent British photographers? Certainly that colour is not the subject, but that it is employed as a means for intensifying the perception of what is being communicated. It is a means, and a vital one, but not an end. And what of American inspiration? Well O'Donnell admits to Meyerowitz, and Fraser to Eggleston, and why not? Without inspiration we die, and it is a fight for these sort of independent photographers to stay alive in the vital sense. We must be grateful for inspiration wherever it comes from but reject mere imitation wherever it too arises. For dates and times of this exhibition see 'On Show' Photographers' Gallery, London.