Christopher Orr

"The Beguiled Eye at the University of Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery was Christopher Orr's first solo show in Scotland, bringing together new and recent paintings and featuring, for the first time, the artist's remarkable sketchbooks. Orr's oil paintings and watercolours offer enigmatic glimpses into other worlds where modern characters appear within expansive environments, laden with drama. The intriguing scenes derive from an appropriation of images from a vast range of visual materials, including National Geographic magazines, scientific manuals, 1950s snaps, art historical images and Super 8 films. Painting allows the artist to meld these diverse elements into coherent vignettes; people and objects encountering one another in what appear to be significant moments within larger schemes.^ In some of the scenes, characters parade in 1950s leisure wear into ethereal landscapes, lit by the heavenly skies of romantic painting, or equally, encroached upon by the dark gloaming of science fiction. In others, figures are beholden to strange geometric forms in the sky or stare at scientific models. Many evoke a sense of communion with the sublime, the otherworldly, the strange and the p