- Venue
- Royal Scottish Academy
- Location
Three teenage figures ambling around a hatchback car in ‘The Secret History of Damascus' bring recognisably Western life to one of the street scenes painted by David Martin. The accompanying text tells us the Syrian capital is "the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world". This excites the viewer into wanting more visual representations of this city.
Capturing change is the task the artist set himself after five months' travel from Cairo to Budapest in 2006. His exhibition grabs the eye and tickles the mind. What his paintings show is best described as a diminutive universalism in his human subjects.
‘The Headscarf Girls' suggests in its composition a repressed optimism. The five young women cover a third of the canvas and are painted such that their faces outdo their dress and the Middle Eastern architecture behind them.
Another Damascus depiction, ‘The Writing on the Wall' is a psychological city painting: Most of the canvas is worked with plaster and brick colourings portraying a wall. On this appear very small images including a gun-toting man, an Arafat-a-like and a cleric. These images are almost lost on the wall suggesting that the media propaganda Martin refers to in his accompanying text has minimal impact on the life of the city.
These are large paintings – similar in size to the plasma television screens hanging in a pub near you – and they reveal adept handling of light. Blues, pinks and yellows bring the sun's rays to characters, buildings and skies. The pictures are immediately pleasing. Martin's titles and text subsequently provoke sober thought on what may be the real urban condition in the Middle East and Eastern (or ‘New') Europe.
‘In The Shadow of Umayyad Mosque' shows Syrian urbanity. A mother and two children are depicted. The older child wears a modern hooded top and denims while the younger one is in a buggy. The mother, also painted with a vigorous young stance, is clad in black yet her veil is almost anachronistic. In this painting David Martin avoids both the cultural correctness and counter-clerical hysteria of many Western representations of the Middle East by alluding to family relations that are as mundane in Syrian sunshine as in balmy Britain. This exhibition illuminates a quiet secularism in the streets of the Middle East that is refractive of the toned down urban life of Western cities.
Moody Turkish teenagers are given approximate cultural perspective through depiction in miniatures like ‘Goths, Istanbul'. Formal analysis reveals similar techniques of collage and paint-layering on both smaller and larger surfaces.
Three of the exhibition's walls hold completed paintings and the fourth shows elements of the artist's method: Photographs capturing human subjects in Belgrade, Istanbul and Budapest are mounted beside sketches and drawings. Hopefully Martin will continue to paint people in their hesitant vitality. His figurative art is a welcome counterpoint to televised news bulletins on human behaviour. The viewer having absorbed a shared idea of modern humanity projects this onto the real cityscape outside.
I am a writer living in Edinburgh keen to develop humanist ideas in modern culture.
