Mosaic Mirror Pattern

Edinburgh untamed

It has neither the panache nor the money of Venice or Basel, Miami or Frieze – which is precisely why the Edinburgh Art Festival, which opened on Thursday, is serious, provocative viewing. The roster of artists at most biennales and fairs today is identikit, conventional and tame. Edinburgh’s this summer is unexpected and diverse – from the Modern Art Gallery’s shimmering small show of new abstract photographs of lightning by Hiroshi Sugimoto to an over-extended survey of Scottish watercolourist Elizabeth Blackadder at the National Gallery on the Mound. The international/local, trendy/traditional balancing act distinguishes Edinburgh; crucially, its original programme challenges on intellectual, contemporary terms the conceptual stranglehold that so often dulls smarter venues.

The most compelling exhibition, Thomas Houseago: The Beat of the Show , is a pertinent illustration. Houseago makes monumental figurative sculptures, rough, cartoonish yet fragile, with giant mask-like faces, marked by a fine draughtsmanship pronounced because part of each figure – an arm, a head – is left unnervingly flat, in two-dimensions rather than three. Houseago is currently showing at François Pinault’s collection in Venice and Charles Saatchi’s in London, so he is as sought after as they come. Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, however, is the first to display his work outdoors, and it is a revelation. Put Houseago in the natural world, and you see immediately his realist impulse: his fanciful creations, testing representational possibilities, here breathe energy and life.