Pieces in the Times and the Sunday Herald both focus on artist Shahin Memishi. Seeking asylum in Glasgow, having been forced to flee his native Kosovo, Memishi (an art teacher) had something of a revelation on seeing work by the so-called New Glasgow Boys for the first time, and this show matches his portraits of the artists he admires with examples of their work.

I’m absolutely not having a go at the writers of these pieces. The curatorial conceit of showing a relatively unknown artist alongside the old guard who inspired him is intriguing, the story of Memishi finding succour in their work is a good, moving one, and a show featuring work by Steven Campbell, Ken Currie and Peter Howson is certainly newsworthy. Also newsworthy is the fact that the works by these artists are from a private collection, and are all for sale. Hmmn.

Anyway, here’s the thing: it’s an awful show. Awful. There’s some good stuff, sure, but none of it is by Memishi, and the hang is farcical. Half the paintings are at wonky angles, a few are sat on the floor, and a decent set of Peter Howson drawings is placed so high on the wall that you’d need to stand on a chair to get a good look at them. One of Memishi’s paintings is set on an easel right in front of a Ken Currie, obscuring it completely. The late Steven Campbell’s name is spelled ‘Stephen’, on the label beside his painting and in the title of Memishi’s portrait. Really. To me, that looks more like an insult to Currie and Campbell than a tribute. And so do Memishi’s paintings, however well-meant they may be. They don’t make you want to claw your eyes out in horror or anything, but they’re the sort of thing you see in those gallery-cum-shops that sell inoffensive stuff by local artists alongside novelty tea-towels and jewellry made by hobbyist housewives. I’m amazed that his subjects, having seen his work, agreed to sit for him (Campbell didn’t, for obvious reasons, but I’m told the rest did). And I nearly got the giggles when reading in the Times that Memishi is, according to Ally Thompson, ‘one of a new breed of European artists galvanising the city’s art scene’. This is not the case.

So, the show doesn’t deserve the oxygen of publicity - it should’ve been suffocated at birth! - but it drew more press than any exhibition in Scotland since the big Emin retrospective and Campbell’s posthumous showing of new work.

My point, I suppose, is that it’s depressing that the visual arts only make the news pages when there’s a whiff of scandal, a record-breaking auction or, as in this case, a heart-warming tale to be told. These things don’t have very much to do with art. My other point is that you shouldn’t waste your time visiting ArtDeCaf this month. Not for the art, anyway, though I feel duty bound to report that they make a pretty decent plate of scrambled eggs.

Update: My review of the show was spiked, for reasons I probably shouldn’t relate here, but you can read it on my Work weblog, if you like.

Here’s the little text I wrote for the show:

Jackie Anderson paints people in places, Toby Messenger paints the places in people.

Anderson’s portraits dispense with the relationship between artist and sitter, catching her subjects unawares, presenting their most private moments, those spent alone in public. These are works full of movement, too, sometimes doubling a figure to catch a shift in expression, sometimes painting only the place that her subject has been, will be, or, even, might never be. The public spaces through which Anderson’s subjects pass are reduced on her canvases to thin shadows and abstracted forms, just as her subjects pass by buildings, cash machines and doorways without seeing them, their surroundings rendered invisible by familiarity. This not only serves to foreground, figuratively and literally, the people painted, it also further absents Anderson from her work as a painter of portraits; the result is a communion between subject and viewer as private as the fleeting moments she has captured.

Messenger’s work is, for the most part, unpopulated, but he tackles landscape at a tangent, matching Anderson’s slippery approach to portraiture. In works made on daily walks in Sienna, always along the same route, Messenger is looking from the corner of his eye, turning his attention to the forms and spaces others might miss - he sees the curve of a roundabout, or the gap in a fence, ignoring grand architecture, blind to sweeping vistas. These are drawings of the spaces that enter memory, but are never remembered; the spaces, perhaps, that reveal more about a place than we realise. In the other series here, the quotidian again fills the frame. There are views from Messenger’s studio window, or chance glances around his working space. Here representation is almost, but not quite, irrelevant, with form and colour worked at for their own sake. These paintings are made not to describe, but because they must be made, like this.

On the surface, the work before you could not be more different. Anderson is ever precise, light, recording; Messenger moves heavy paint, suggesting, transforming. Beneath those different surfaces, though, both work to reveal the in between.