Art review: The RSA Annual Exhibition 2018, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

Since the RSA abandoned open submission for its principal exhibition, the form of this annual event has been a combination of a curated exhibition, including invited artists both from within and without the Academy, and one open to all academicians. It doesn’t sound like a formula for coherence and indeed over the last few years it has sometimes not been easy to see the logic. This year, however, Calum Colvin as convenor of the 192nd annual exhibition has made this rather cumbrous idea work admirably. (Note that he is officially the show’s convenor, not its curator, a wonderful escape from that sadly overused word. You can apparently get a sandwich curated in New York these days.) His theme is art and poetry and it runs through the show like a line of coloured thread lightly stitched through a piece of fabric. He was stimulated to choose it, he says, by conversations around his own portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid, a work he actually created in the gallery during the Academy’s recent Ages of Wonder exhibition and which, a priori, blends art with poetry. That portrait is here. A composite of painting, assemblage and photography, the poet’s image is intercut with images of books by and about him, letters in his hand and other memorabilia, all set in an artist’s studio. The man, his poetry and the art that sets out to represent him all intersect indivisibly.