Talbot Rice Gallery used to be a stuffy space, oddly claus­tro­phobic despite its size, with grey Edinburgh skies always looming over the works on show from skylights above. Now, thanks to a wall of restored windows, the lower galleries are flooded with light, which, fittingly, is the main in­gredi­ent of David Batchelor’s work.

Best known for his softly glowing il­lu­min­ated sculp­tures, for this set of new pieces Batchelor has, borrowing a title from MTV’s series of acoustic gigs, unplugged his work, trading ar­ti­fi­ci­al light for ar­ti­fi­ci­al colour. First come the Parap­il­lars, great higgeldy-piggeldy totem poles made of goods purchased at pound shops in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Arranged around Meccano-like metal struc­tures, each of these heady sculp­tures has its own focus: one consists of pliers and screw­drivers in manly orange and black, another is all combs and mirrors in eye-searing neon hues, yet another piles up children’s toys and knick-knacks. The overall effect is over­whelm­ing, like a bad dream in Blackpool, and darkly comic too, as Batchelor holds up his tacky and cheap finds for re­spect­ful ex­am­in­a­tion.

There is, of course, nothing new about elevating the status of everyday objets trouvé by shifting their context away from the high street and into the gallery, and the prints and drawings that line the walls of Talbot Rice’s mezzanine show that Batchelor might well have used other objects to craft his towers: he is in­ter­es­ted in their status, for sure, but he is far more in­ter­es­ted in their colour. Where you might expect lists and diagrams, Batchelor’s pre­par­at­ory drawings and in­stal­l­a­tion guides for this and past ex­hib­i­tions (some date back a decade) are pure, cel­e­b­rat­ory bursts of sprayed paint on graph paper, sometimes connected with scraps of gaffer tape, as if the artist is engaged in an ongoing set of tests, half meth­od­ic­al, half maniacal, matching one colour with another just for the pleasure of seeing them together.

Finally, as a sort of coda, the small rotunda gallery is given over to Anatomy Lesson (Part 1). Based on a discarded stuffed toy, this dis­em­bod­ied dog’s head is covered in sparkling gold sequins, and, suspended from the ceiling by its right ear, spins slowly, in­ex­or­ably, its sad cartoon eyes casting a resigned, accepting glance over the gallery walls. There is something terribly gloomy about this gilded piece of tat. It calls to mind the endless optimism of a disco glitter ball, but denies it, too - no one in their right mind would want to dance in a nightclub under the gaze of a dead dog in shiny drag. And so, being much more explicit than Batchelor’s other sculp­tur­al works, this anatomy lesson forces us to think again about the happy towers of colour down­s­tairs, lending the Parap­il­lars a grim, gloomy and ob­ses­sion­al cast, which sits un­com­fort­ably with their apparent cel­e­b­ra­tion of the pound shop aesthetic. And that seems to be the key to un­der­stand­ing Batchelor’s work, which rests on a series of con­trast­ing dualities, pitting the serious and pseudo-sci­en­ti­f­ic against the un­th­ink­ing joy to be found in ex­per­i­en­cing colour for its own sake.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.