I wonder if there has been an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland that has captured a Scottish artist in his prime artistically, commercially and also critically, as well as Peter Doig's wonderful show in Edinburgh this summer.
No Foreign Lands is not only unmissable in the suddenly very good Edinburgh Art Festival (director Sorcha Carey is doing a top job), but is a highlight of the entire Edinburgh festival season. The big rooms of the RSA are large enough, just, to hold and resonate with the colour and splendour of Doig's big canvasses.
Each work is its own world. The figures in them are haunting and haunted by the colours and landscapes and ghosts that exist fluidly around them.
There is some luscious work here: Music Of The Future is a scene from a dream of tropical twilight, the both exact and vague Grand Riviere could be a resemblence of a lost or still to be discovered Eden. His new work, which Mr Doig completed as it came out of its air freight boxes, shows more of his mysterious figures in landscapes.
A pale and tender rendering of his son, called August In Febuary, shows the long-haired youth on a boat heading to distant mountains,with an angel, or fuzz of light fizzing, in a briny, conflicted sky.
It is beautiful, as lovely as his Girl In Tree. There is darkness, even horror, and displacement too, and, although the artist denies it, in the more revelatory works, a sense of the numinous. There is much fine painting here, and paint that overwhelms the canvass, frame and senses.
Doig paintings sell for millions of pounds. Thousands of people should see this essential show, a deep sensory and sensual wonderland which is as much conjured as it is painted.
Fiona Banner eschews paint, and works in words and paper, illuminations and concrete ideas. Her show The Vanity Press at the excellent and somewhat bewildering Summerhall repays close study. Her video of the actress Samantha Morton reading a description of her naked body is moving and uncomfortable. The video, in another room, of a Chinook helicopter performing remarkable stunts is hair-raising in itself.
In the building's basement, you may have read about Gregor Schneider's Susser Duft Edinburgh 2013. After venturing through two bleak white spaces, you stand in a dark shipping container with 10 naked black men. It is, primarily, an experience, and can only, perhaps, be judged on each visitor's reaction. If the naked men, in the final room, were women, it would be a very different show. If they were white, also different. As it is, as white male in a room of naked black men, I felt little beyond the initial surprise of close proximity to nudity.
Credit to the 'actors' who have the onerous task of standing around naked for several hours a day, essentially doing nothing. But ultimately, I did not feel discomfort or shame in their presence. So I could not glimpse (maybe I was having a bad day) what I was meant to be feeling.
Which was not a problem with Derek Jarman's The Blue Book, also in Summerhall, one of only four proof copies of the book made by the film maker before he died. Not sure about the fonts used on the wall legends, but the words are affecting.
In greener fields, out in the light and trees, at Jupiter Artland near Wilkieston, the festival unveiled Patterns, a new work by Sara Barker. Unlike other works at the buzzing art park (attendences up more than 80% on last year, I hear), this piece feels fragile and breakable, a complex and tense structure that hints at a frozen jag of lightning.
There are glass panels and metal frame, a step and a slight sense of temporary shelter from the elements.
More instantly fun is the Steam Powered Internet Machine that Jeremy Deller had placed in the main courtyard of the Artland, its sudden loud hoots (whilst scaring my two-year-old son) more pleasant than a mobile phone jingle.
In the exhibition space, Deller and his collaborator Ed Hall, have hung the series of flags - like old trade union flags, but with more contemporary and slyer legends - and for the uninitiated, provide a short cut into Deller's work: the politics, the examination of a lost communal past, the idealism, which powered his excellent show at the Venice Biennale this year.
l Peter Doig, No Foreign Lands, National Galleries Of Scotland until November 3.
l Gregor Schneider, Summerhall, until August 25.
l Fiona Banner and Derek Jarman, Summerhall, until August 31.
l Sara Barker at Jupiter Artland, permanent.
l Jeremy Deller at Jupiter Artland until September 15.
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