Virtual show is technically excellent but marred by lack of vision

For reasons that everyone understands, the RSA has closed its doors for the time being.

Not to be completely thwarted by the restrictions on movement and access, the 194th annual exhibition of academicians’ work has gone online. The situation is better than nothing, but it is difficult to see detail, texture and nuance. So, a fair assessment is impossible and the best that can be done is to convey impressions based on partial experience.

Even at the best of times, the RSA annual show still seems like a closed shop, with whiffs of “jobs for the boys” and “I’ll scratch your back. . . ” favouritism. As in previous years, this show is characterised by excellent technical skills but marred by thematic dullness and a lack of vision.

Looking through the 40 works online, it’s difficult to find anything that stands out and hits you between the eyes. You’d be forgiven for thinking on the evidence here that our world was not gripped by poverty, war, social injustice, environmental catastrophe and any number of other pressing concerns.

There are a few brave voices crying out in an attempt to break the moribund bourgeois constraints that define the RSA. One is Ross Sinclair, recently elected to the society, who uses the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath to ask some pertinent questions about the state of the nation, left. “We’re halfway there” in terms of freedoms, he concludes.

In one of his bold, poster prose-poems, Timothy Neat asks the question: “Stands scotland where she did?” Completing this trinity of politically themed work is Sandy Moffat’s portrait of Alasdair Gray, who died in December last year. It captures Gray’s dishevelled intelligence, with a Saltire flag in the background underlining the sitter and portraitist’s shared patriotic intent.

Magnified, multiple images of works, as well as video, would have enhanced audience experience, but no amount of technology would be able to change this show’s staid and lacklustre aspect.

Until May 3 at www.royalscottishacademy.org/exhibitions/rsa-annual-exhibition-2020/