Ingrid Calame @ Fruitmarket Gallery

Unfortunately, identifiable with a style of modernism appropriated by every homeware store, you could be excused for thinking you’ve seen it all before when it comes to Ingrid Calame’s paintings at the Fruitmarket Gallery.

However, Calame’s work is testimony to the fact that no form of art should be dismissed because of the media used in its creation, or even the aesthetic it adopts, traditional or otherwise. Though the artist’s oil paintings on the ground floor are the weakest of the exhibition, the show becomes more significant and original when you realise that Calame has traced all of the lines and marks from which she composes her work from the city streets and riverbeds of L.A.

What seem like abstract, cartographical images are in fact 1:1 ratio representations of reality – literal, indexical traces. She attempts to transform the everyday scars of the city, the marks of people’s lives, into something comprehensible and honest. Calame’s work, in this sense, is conceptually opposed to abstraction.

The drawing works upstairs make up for what’s on show downstairs. Gorgeous, sweet-hued lines ripple delightfully across a cosmos of semi-opaque paper, where watermelon pinks transform into blackcurrants and fade into Crayola-coined electric tangerine. The paper seems to undulate as if silk, caught in the sunlight. Lost in constellations of colour, our belief in the power of the aesthetic might even be restored. It seems it is more beautiful than we thought out there on the ‘side-walks’ and in the riverbeds of the city. [Sarah Hardie]