Melancholia at Jensen Gallery

The work of Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic.

Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation," quotes the poster for Jensen Gallery's Melancholia exhibition.

Casting a subdued, contemplative atmosphere, Melancholia collects the work of eight artists, each depicting a solitary twilight between sadness and hope.

"It's a word that seems to have lost the true complexity of its meaning," says gallery owner Andrew Jensen of the exhibition's title, which references Albrecht Durer's gloomy 1514 engraving of the same name, and the temperament that is said to accompany genius, particularly of a creative kind.

"When we talk about melancholia, it is very easy to get straight to depression. I think it's an entirely different notion than that."

The show was inspired by a trip to Europe in June, when Jensen saw a video work by Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic at the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland.

He secured a copy of it for the exhibition.

"It's an incredibly compelling and mesmerising image for all sorts of reasons," he says, describing the video which shows a nude Abramovic slowly breathing whilst lying beneath a human skeleton. "She was in tears at the end of the performance, I believe.

"It is loaded with art historical references, like [Hans] Holbein's Dead Christ, but also there are ideas about the eroticism of death and a whole range of other implications that run through it. It also seemed to trigger in me some images to do with melancholia. The use of the skeleton in art history is an image of the apocalyptic nature of death and all those kind of things collaged together."

The quality of melancholia has a bittersweet taste, which Jensen says gives it a transient duality. "I wasn't really thinking about making a show about melancholia. It could equally be called beauty because, in a way, the quality of melancholia or that touch of sadness in all these works is the kind of tempering or leavening aspect that beauty needs."

American artist Ann Hamilton contributes seven self-portraits that seem withdrawn and introspective. Photographed through rippled glass as part of an installation at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the images are obscured like a ghostly reflection.

"It is almost like Ophelia rising up through the water but you can't quite reach in to get her," says Jensen. "They are like the filmic way you remember things. Our nostalgia for people - maybe someone who has died or is not around any more - is never quite clear, and every time you recall it, the image is slightly different."

Light plays an important role in the show, whether it is shining through the window of American photographer James Casebere's submerged, subterranean architecture or illuminating the horizon of desolate landscapes by Irish painter Elizabeth Magill and Colin McCahon, which are echoed in the damp, abstract washes of Scottish painter Callum Innes.

"There is a certain level of psychological or physical abandonment in the architecture of the space - the figure has gone or is on its way out. [There is] something about that last light of day. That fading last moment and you see that look of disintegration in the colour and light of the Callum Innes."

Although McCahon made many paintings with sombre themes and desolate landscapes, it was important for Jensen to choose one that wasn't too melodramatic. Kokowai, the McCahon painting he chose, depicts Muriwai Beach. It is mostly composed of floating fields of black with a flash of deep red, resembling the late paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, also renowned for his melancholic temperament.

There are also similarities to the large fields of colour and low horizon lines of Innes' work.

Although this is not meant to be a landscape, Jensen still detects a hint of the moody Scottish landscape in the work. "When you are standing on the North Sea coast out of Edinburgh looking up at the sky and think of the kind of meteorological portent that is in the North Sea sky - that weight you start to see the horizon lines [in the painting]. And, in a way, the darkness of an abridged winter day in Edinburgh or Glasgow."

Jensen says there is also a hint of optimism in the faded tones of his exhibition.

"As much as you can talk about last light of day, they could also be first light of day. It could equally be the reverse. It is not lights extinguished, it's being able to catch that last flicker of light."

Where: Jensen Gallery, 61 Upper Queen St, to Dec 11