The Islanders: An Introduction; Charles Avery
Until February 15 2009; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Exactly three years ago I stood in Edinburgh’s doggerfisher gallery and drooled, for hours, over a handful of drawings by Charles Avery, under the collective name of The Islanders: An Introduction. No clues were provided to unlock the meaning of these cryptic scenarios, except their even more cryptic titles. Central to the show was a hunched old man in a workshop of weird and wonderful creatures, a glorious piece of pencil-drawn theatre called Avatars.

The lines were gloriously fluent, the figures dripped with character, and every carefully- contoured detail lured me further in. Each time my disbelief disappeared deep into suspension, the artist would jolt it out again with an unerased guideline or a curiously two-dimensional object. Avery was master of my attention, and Avatars entertained me for as long as some stage plays last.

What I didn’t know then was that the young artist had embarked on a long-term project to describe an imaginary island world. He was into his second year of shaping the culture, customs and beliefs of the island’s curious inhabitants, documenting them in drawings, text and sculpture. Having spent his early years on Mull, it is widely accepted that much of his inspiration came from that Hebridean isle.

Since then, Avery has shown at the Venice Biennale and has just been selected for next year’s Tate Triennial. He has been lauded as the best figurative artist around, and now, four years into his project, he has a solo show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The exhibition bears the same name as it did at doggerfisher, but it’s ten times the size. Having derived such pleasure from one or two excerpts, I couldn’t wait for the full-scale show, salivating at the thought of Avery’s elegant outlines, his Leonardo-style grotesques, and the mysterious worlds of his imagination.

Perhaps, with expectations like these, I was bound to be disappointed. But nothing quite comes together as it did three years ago: the drawings are of variable quality, the best being those which I had seen already; the arrangement is clumsy and hard to navigate; and screeds of unforgiving text on A4 boards – several in each room – are doomed to remain unread.

Avery’s ambition – after devoting his life to the island – is to have the whole thing bound into several encyclopaedic volumes. The book, for him, is the finished work. Everything else, including this exhibition, is merely the preparation, and that’s how it feels.

Visually, the island oscillates between sparse, pyramid-strewn planes worthy of Star Wars, and couthy pub scenes which owe more than a little to the artist’s Hebridean heritage. Heidless Macgregor’s Bar is a homage to the local pub which time forgot, made strange only by the duck-billed character wandering around in a top hat.

Avery’s island – unnamed because it is the whole world to its inhabitants – is shared by creatures of various social castes and functions, from gods to scavenger Gob-S-Hites. Its mountains are insurmountable and at the centre of the island lies a hole known as The Darkness That Conceals Only Itself. The people have no conventional morals, but hold strong philosophical opinions which lead to heated arguments and deep divisions.

Avery’s own persona on this island is a colonial hunter, who arrived in the belief that he was discovering virgin territory. Embarrassed to discover a whole civilisation, he now devotes himself to pursuing the unreceptive Miss Miss, and hunting the Noumenon, a creature which many believe doesn’t exist.

The Noumenon is one of several terms Avery has borrowed from philosophy – Kant used it to describe the thing in itself; an object independent of our perception. That is the nub of the artist’s project: how does his earnest hunter describe the island without taking part in its existence, and influencing it along the way? Can Avery’s subject, or any artist’s, be conveyed without losing its own ideal form?

Although questions like these are foremost in the artist’s mind, his descriptions of the island are too playful to become seriously weighed down. Market traders sell “real pictures of nudey women” and seriously addictive gin-pickled eggs, which have their own back-story (and a specimen jar, displayed on a plinth for our scrutiny).

Avatars – that drawing which entranced me in 2005 – is still one of the star attractions of the show, along with some gorgeously elegant, mannerist studies of hunters at rest. Drawings made since that time tend to suffer from over-working, and disappointingly prosaic passages.

One exception, though, is The Place Of The Rout Of The If’en, Avery’s most ambitious composition to date. The cinematic, packed market square is a writhing mass, held together by the tension between the architectural, often unfinished lines of the background, and the dynamic, finely-worked figures in the foreground. The eye roves constantly, discovering luscious lines, intriguing characters and puzzling details.

While the artist has an indisputable flair for characterisation, it can make you uneasy at times. We know that Mull, where Avery played on his own as a child, is in his words “the total basis of my subconscious”. But a whiff of aristocracy exudes from the artist’s images, beyond the deliberate conceit of his story. His view of Mull locals recalls that of the taxidermist studying interesting specimens prior to stuffing. The central figure in Avatars is, after all, a taxidermist with C Avery written on his door.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.12.08