Edinburgh art festival review – from the sublime to the meaningless

A retrospective of Bridget Riley is truly dazzling, a history of collage makes the cut, but the rest of Edinburgh’s annual art showcase is a mixed bag

See our gallery of festival artworks

Bridget Riley should be illegal. After a few minutes in her sensational retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery my perceptions were all over the place. Paintings were rocking and rolling through grand white salons, moving in waves, sending hills and troughs from their flat surfaces into three-dimensional space. One Riley makes you larger, one makes you small, and the rest of the Edinburgh art festival doesn’t do anything at all.

Riley is 88 but her art has never felt younger than it does in this scintillating exhibition. It’s the display her art has long deserved – one that does justice to her experimental spirit and dazzling intelligence over six decades, without losing sight of the 1960s utopianism that is her enduring legacy. It refuses to plod along in chronological order. Instead, it starts with a brilliant spin through her fascination with the dappled optical art of Georges Seurat. In 1960 she painted Pink Landscape, a rural vista that bursts into a vibrating light show of separated spots of blue, pink and gold. No sooner have your eyes acclimatised to this unreal pointillism that they’re being taken for a ride by the black and white visual trickery of 1961’s Movement in Squares, whose mind-boggling array of narrowing rectangles, like a phantasmagorical chess board, sucks you into what feels like a fold in the fabric of reality.

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