Fred Tomaselli – Monsters Of Paradise: Magnus said before we entered that he had never seen a bad exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. I had: me, Tom and Dr T had seen this Jeff Koons exhibition there and had been particularly underwhelmed. But I was willing to let Magnus’s infectious enthusiasm drag me in.
I felt bad about breaking his duck. Tomaselli’s large collages are blandly pretty in an abstract way from a distance, and become less interesting the closer you get. When you see the strands and strings are made of cut out magazine noses, eyes, lips and pills it makes little symbolic sense, the bits are blandly as uninteresting as the whole large affair. The Fruitmarket Gallery seems to like housing big art (if the Koons was also anything to go by) and these large but dull affairs dominated the room. There was a lot of that art gallery too-ing and fro-ing to see if it looked better close up or far away. And at least the effect of the work being set in amber by builing up layers (of varnish?) to give the pictures a degree of physical depth was vaguely interesting, but it did often mean people spent more time looking at the side of the work than the work itself. A little bit too drug happy, the art did nothing for me.
I did however like the small prints he had made in the next room. These were prints of plates similar to those you would get in a birdwatching book with names and birds ranging from the palusible to the silly (I guess there could be a bird called the Greater Pewee.) Whilst nothing new – strokes of a more subtle and hence less striking Great Bear abound – I liked these pieces. It managed the two key points of art I could live with, it looked good and was interesting. And having discovered that I can get one of these prints for ‘100 I am almost tempted. But do I really want to support an artist whose work I on the whole do not like? Is that what buying art is about (probably not).