David Batchelor: Flatlands @ Fruitmarket

Conventionally marginalised or removed from fine art, colour is tacky, tasteless; a distraction from the purity of intellect of serious artistic endeavour ever since the paint rubbed off the ancient Greek statuary. There is a reason westerners trill at the sight of polluted, overcrowded, poverty-stricken India. It's the shock of the colour, everywhere, the sudden realisation that a polychromatic world is a visually stimulating world, and one which produces a simple emotional reaction, unsought – joy.

Enough of your staid monochromatic art, says David Batchelor. He explores the bright lights of the neon city, of advertising billboards and screaming cereal boxes. He does this through sculpture, most famously, but also through drawing and painting, a branch of his practice brought together here in the Fruitmarket for the first time.

On the ground floor we find his Atomic Drawings, pinned to the wall at eye height around two of the gallery walls. Created using everyday materials like marker pen and household paint, they allude to an intensive production, of an idea captured and exorcised onto the page. On paper, Batchelor’s drawings still exist within a three dimensional world. They evoke ideas for sculptures that may never exist, ones that defy the laws of gravity but can be visualised, here, in all their mystifying glory.

In the adjoining gallery, a recent series intervening with the theoretical journal October. A symbol of the arid intellectual pinnacle of fine art, October has been published since the 1970s and has steadfastly refused to include colour. How gauche, that colour. Batchelor responds by covering page after page of the first issue in multi-coloured bubbles and vectors, bursting out of the art theory and redacting Michel Foucault and Marcel Duchamp in a sea of pure visual joy. The apparent straightforwardness of this act of undermining is rendered complex by Batchelor’s other career within the world of art theory.

Upstairs hangs the Blobs series, vast planes of single colour gloss on aluminium, the paint formed into crinkles and rivulets emerging out of the metal 'canvas.' As Batchelor says, “To run into colour is to run out of words.” [Rosamund West]