The first thing you notice about Carol Rhodes’ work is not what she paints, but where she paints from. The over­whelm­ing majority of pieces in this show, a career survey that gathers together paintings from the past 15 years of Rhodes’ practice, are painted from an im­pos­s­ibly ver­ti­gin­ous veiwpoint. There are few horizon lines to be found in these land­s­capes, and they are almost always presented from an awkwardly steep angle, prompting a queasy, dizzying sensation close to vertigo or air-sickness.

And then there’s Rhodes’ taste for the mundane. The world that she creates, combining elements from aerial pho­to­graphs to craft realistic, but never quite real scenes, is free of glorious natural form­a­tions, glamorous urban ar­chi­tec­ture or the twee pleasures of a rural village. Instead, Rhodes turns her eyes toward the un­pre­pos­ses­ing margins, the factories and out­build­ings and minor airports that populate those unnamed spaces beyond the suburbs, the not-quite-coun­tryside places where buildings rise up as and when they are needed, with little planning and no high-falutin’ ar­chi­tects bent on making a statement.

This com­bin­a­tion of a heli­c­op­ter­’s eye view and dull ar­chi­tec­ture and in­fra­struc­ture has one immediate effect: it is im­pos­s­ible to stand before one of Rhodes’ small paintings without seeking to populate them. Who works in this factory? Who lives on that barren moor? Who on earth would spend an idle afternoon at this picnic area? And, most of all, why are they being watched, silently, from above?

Rhodes is careful not to provide any answers. A human figure never appears to offer a clue to the purpose of a given structure or en­vir­on­ment, and works carry the lightest of titles, simply iden­ti­fy­ing a key element, or two, of the com­pos­i­tion, a trick that only serves to heighten the viewer’s curiosity before shrugging it off. It might, in fact, be wise to ignore the tem­pta­tion to pad out Rhodes’ paintings with an invented backstory. There are hints, certainly, that something is not quite right in these places, and that we might not like the answers to the questions these works quietly insist that we ask.

Not ever­yth­ing is uncanny in Rhodes’ world. There is something pleas­ingly non-committal in her brushwork, par­t­ic­u­larly in those expanses of emptiness that are a constant in her work, as if none of these paintings will ever be truly finished, just as the scenes surveyed are haphazard, higgeldy-piggeldy, unplanned and in­com­p­lete. These marks are not careless - Rhodes is a dis­t­inc­tly de­lib­er­ate painter, one who produces just a few works each year - and serve to emphasise that these are paintings, a quiet reminder that viewers should not get too caught up in the unusual viewpoint and the scenes shown, but keep a close eye on the skew-whiff com­pos­i­tions, flat and muted palette and carefully marked surfaces that Rhodes lays out before them. There is also something almost tender about the way Rhodes puts down paint, as if she has found herself growing deeply fond of the rather unlovely places she am­al­gam­ates, not going so far as to celebrate the scenes surveyed, but according them a level of respect, and passing that respect on to the viewer.

This show will not, I imagine, have viewers flocking to the edges of cities and fea­ture­less moors, filled with a newfound affection for drinking in land­s­capes that inspire not awe but uneasy boredom. It does, though, offer a challenge to pre­con­ceived notions about the places we pass by or through with blinkers on. It might be a bit of a stretch to dub Rhodes the Ballard of the brown­field site, but just as that writer thrills to the ul­tra­mod­er­n­ity of motorways and the sexual pos­s­ib­il­it­ies of multi-story car parks, so this painter offers a curiously warm re­ap­prais­al of urban outskirts and un­edi­fy­ing edifices, for all that she seems keen to point out and heighten the essential oddness and dis­com­fort to be found in such non-places.

The most sa­t­is­fy­ing aspect of what is, arguably, an overdue survey of one of Scotland’s best painters, is the real­isa­tion that Rhodes’ practice, though it is tightly focussed and returns again and again to the same themes and concerns, is broad and deep, with much more to offer than one might expect from a painter who has settled so firmly on a style and subject. There is, too, a sense that that Rhodes might just be on the cusp of something new. The latest works on show see her falling to the earth, so to speak, and preparing to hit the ground running, ex­chan­ging the high altitude overviews for a much closer look. Perhaps, in some future ex­hib­i­tion, covering the next fifteen years, we will find Rhodes stepping inside the struc­tures she has thus far examined on high, revealing some of their mysteries, or, better yet, providing more un­set­t­ling am­bi­gu­it­ies. An unlikely prospect, maybe, but a tempting one.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 28th, 2007.