Midnight Clear @ Frame Creative

Another art gallery is exactly what Edinburgh’s New Town doesn’t need. However, Frame Creative marks an exciting departure from the stuffy, often repetitive, commercialism to which its neighbours are prone. Although its exhibiting conditions are much the same (the gallery is a modest, white walled, converted basement flat), the works displayed in this debut exhibition, Midnight Clear, offers a refreshing glimpse at a range of emerging artistic talent, unseen in the Gallery Triangle previously.

It’s a predictable corollary for a fine art space hatched out of a graphic design studio, but the best artists the gallery has selected to showcase are the ones with a graphic or illustrative edge. Vangeli Moschopoulos’s work articulates the disciplinary overlap of fine art and design most audibly, particularly in his Figures of Resistance, series, which merges a poster-aesthetic with a critically rigorous content. A plethora of highly skilled print techniques fix the bold quotes and iconic images onto Moschopoulos’s political pastiches, whilst the thoughtful studies of historical resistance that precede each work force further, sustained observation.

Jessie Harris’s illustrations also captivate the viewer. Her figurative drawings are so perspicaciously crafted that from the simple, playful lines that build each form, clearly defined characters and stories unfold. An analogy between the human form and landscape is present in Varun Cursetji’s Lost. Sharp, mapping lines overlap the luscious, fleshy paint tones that construct Cursetji’s vulnerably posed figure, presenting it as oddly inanimate and difficult to turn away from.

A few gaudy gilt frames displaying abstracted landscape studies crop up here and there. They can be forgiven if viewed ironically, or as something for the area’s old-timers. They work best, though, as a reminder that Frame Creative is actually a New Town commercial gallery. With the majority of works filling the show transporting you elsewhere with their narratives, it's easy to forget this is the case. Which wouldn’t be very good for sales, would it?