Top to bottom: Satoshi Watanabe: Black Out and White Out (Giza), 1999, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 72.5 cm; Black Out and White Out (Giza), 1999, vinyl chloride, 60.5 x 72.5 cm; An Invisible Friend, 2000, oil on canvas, 83 x 83 cm; courtesy Taro Nasu Gallery

In 1967 Guy Debord famously wrote, "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation. All real activity has been channelled into the global construction of the spectacle." ¹

Hidden Landscapes, an exhibition of paintings by Japanese artist Satoshi Watanabe, revisits the idea of a reality replaced by images through a (re)presentation of world-famous buildings, landscapes and landmarks, which include the Guggenheim, the Louvre, Tate Modern, the pyramids at Giza, Peru's Nazca Lines and the Taj Mahal. Many of the paintings in the exhibition have been created and displayed as a pair - a positive and negative image of each site. The immediate impact of the paintings, particularly the double images, is due to hundreds of dots which obscure the image, creating a 'screen' or veiling effect. Watanabe's 'dot system' technique is simple but impressive - the surface of a blank canvas is covered with hundreds of small, white circular stickers or 'dots'. The landscape/tourist attraction is painted over the 'stickered' canvas in a traditional, representational style. On completion of the painting each dot is systematically removed and transferred to another blank canvas, creating a second painting - a negative of the first. The apparently pixellated, computer-generated images of tourist attractions and heritage sites are, on closer inspection, 'handcrafted', labour-intensive works. However, Watanabe's 'dot' system should not be seen as yet another stylistic 'trademark', gimmick or novelty effect. In this case, Watanabe's technique acts as a catalyst for consideration of the conceptual elements of the images portrayed - a visual and technical parallel to the subject matter itself.

In Mapping the Postmodern Andreas Huyssen suggested that "forms and images are now stored for instant recall in the computerised memory banks of our culture." ² In much of this exhibition Watanabe has chosen to represent images which amount to visual cliché, ironically and deliberately emphasised by the employment of mechanical looking dots, to the end that both the representation of the image and the image itself appear manufactured and nature becomes culture.

The idea of over-exposure or image 'overkill' - that certain landscapes, people or places can never be presented in a 'pure' or 'truthful' way because of the associations and preconceived notions that we bring to them - has been a recurring preoccupation for artists and cultural critics for over half a century. In Hidden Landscapes even non-specific landscapes such as In China, or Sands contribute to a sense of geographical déjà vu. The ever-increasing collective consciousness of contemporary society ensures that even places and people we have never seen appear to be recognisable. The wonders of the world are reduced to another 'been there, done that' tick on the tourist itinerary.

In an art-historical sense, Watanabe's Hidden Landscapes comes loaded with further references, among them Malcolm Morley's photorealist images of cruise liners, Warhol's Disaster Series and, in particular, Roy Lichtenstein's images of 'beauty spots' such as the Sussex Downs in Sussex (1964). Lichtenstein's original paintings employed the use of 'Ben Day' dots over exaggerated brushwork to give his work the look of mass-produced comic books and pulp fiction - pointillist Pop Art. Watanabe acknowledges Lichtenstein's influence in the exhibition catalogue for Hidden Landscapes, noting his interest in the Brushstroke Series ("I even painted a copy of a Lichtenstein work.") Malcolm Morley's representations of tourism and leisure, adopted a similarly systematic approach to Watanabe's 'dot system'; allegedly he used a system of grids and squares to paint images from travel-agent photographs of ocean liners, reinforcing the idea of artist as producer and the tourist as consumer.

Watanabe's An Invisible Friend, like Lichtenstein's parodies of early modern artists, evokes the 17th-century Italianate landscapes of Poussin and Claude Lorraine. In an attempt to create an idealised landscape 'artistic license' allowed biblical or mythological subjects to be taken out of context and 'superimposed' onto scenes of Italian countryside in the 1600s. An Invisible Friend recalls this compositional tradition in including an enigmatic figure which is of equal importance to the landscape itself. A contemporary figure, silhouetted through removal of the dots, is set against a classical 'backdrop'. The tonal variations of the trees create a double 'camouflage' effect in the outlined figure. The camouflaged 'friend', almost blending into the landscape, is fashionably dressed in baggy, 'camouflage' urban streetwear creating an anachronistic, postmodern visual pun. Estate Car and Prefab House, companion paintings to An Invisible Friend, depict key objects identifying the 'flat-pack' style that heralds the demise of individual style and culture and the triumph of capitalism, consumerism and globalisation.

Watanabe's 'picturesque' images of beauty spots and cultural sites seem, in part, to adhere to the 18th-century notion of the picturesque - the theory of association in which objects (and by extension people and places) were rendered more poignant by the thoughts which they inspired. If elements of Watanabe's paintings are truly picturesque, the original notions of the Romantic and 'ideal' (representations of which quickly became mundane or purely decorative) have been replaced by postmodern associations involving consumption, saturation, irony and kitsch.

As a graduate of the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art, it is fitting that Watanabe should return to the School with Hidden Landscapes, through which he adeptly highlights the cultural reciprocity of Japan and Scotland on both a personal and general level. Coincidentally, it is deliciously ironic, in the context of Watanabe's work, that the venue itself should be Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 'landmark' building. Hidden Landscapes has been hung in an exhibition space historically known as the Museum, within what Pevsner described as the 'Monument to Modern architecture in Europe'. Hundreds of visitors to the building will flood past Hidden Landscapes during its run, before buying a 'Mackintosh-inspired' souvenier to complete the 'experience'.

Jonathan Owen: Halo (detail right), 2000; courtesy doggerfish Jonathan Owen: I don't usually do this (detail), 2001, acrylic wall painting; courtesy doggerfish

Add a coat of gold-leaf and Jonathan Owen's Halo, one of the works included in his solo show, the inaugural exhibition at Edinburgh's Doggerfisher, could have been plucked straight from Fra Angelico's Annunciation. Owen's sources are, however, closer to Hugh Heffner and Haynes manuals than Giotto and Duccio - there is little sacred here. The halos, previously shown at the Collective Gallery, are cut from car manuals, martial art books, football papers and pornographic magazines, and it is only on peering closely at each halo that the high-colour, gloss and splatter of 'men n' motors' imagery is identifiable. The subjects of Owens work are almost the stuff of nursery rhymes - Georgy Porgy crossed with the frogs, snails and puppy dogs' tails of 'lad culture'.

A kind of artistic voyeurism is encountered in the work of both Satoshi Watanabe and Jonathan Owen as the blank spaces and cut-out sections invite the viewer to look more closely - 'filling in the blanks' in order to see the image beneath. I Don't Usually Do This, a sequence of hands delicately painted directly onto a vast white wall, is a case in point. As Elisabeth Mahoney noted "the hands in the work are enigmatic; something is definitely missing - a musical instrument, perhaps a cello?" The subtlety, elegance and delicacy of these blue line drawings give way to a mock-horror response on realisation of what the hands are actually doing. Owen wittily uses feminine imagery as the guise under which this boyish nastiness lurks. Halo could be a Blue Peter cut-out of a snowflake or butterfly; a diagram of a car suspension and steering column (taken from the pages of a car manual) is set against a chintzy floral motif. While Bastard looks like the mock-Victorian press-out cardboard figures beloved of little girls.

Owen's presentation of modern masculinity perhaps concerns itself with the way men appear to be pushed in particular stereotypical directions, that they are expected to behave in certain ways. Even when doing so, however, they are still belittled, or made to feel that their behaviour is 'tolerated' rather than encouraged - mixed messages indeed. It is assumed, therefore, that 'healthy' adolescent boys will (and possibly should) be 'into' porn, car manuals and martial art. In Bastard, as in life, boys are expected to make girls cry, while lads, as in Owen's Lads, are expected to enjoy engaging in male bonding rituals. Similarly, Watanabe's tourists are expected to find particular places or monuments interesting or beautiful.

The success of Hidden Landscapes and Owen's work at doggerfisher is the accessibility of both exhibitions, which maintain an intelligent, questioning approach, inverting expectations. Additionally, both artists, consciously or not, manipulate how the works are considered. Direct expression of the subjects addressed would allow the visitor, if so inclined, to turn away or avert the eyes, but for both exhibitions the visitor often feels the need to go close to the work, then stand back and take it all in. For Owen the visual veil or double image achieved through his blank spaces and cut-outs is teasing, inviting, and reminiscent of the way in which Robert Hornsby's Flystrips 'ensnared' the spectator in the Fotofeis '97ýexhibition held at The Arches in Glasgow. Appropriately, the effect is laddish - a joke at the spectator's expense. Watanabe's 'screen' acts a multi-layered metaphor - the cultural screen of communication, the façades of museums and monuments and the insidious advertising techniques of tourism.

Owen's exhibition at doggerfisher, like Watanabe at Glasgow School of Art, also has the fringe benefit of a hugely ironic, contextual backdrop - it is housed within the postindustrial confines of a former tyre factory - a bastion of Pirelli calendars, car manuals and dirty hands.

1Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , Zone Books, 1995 edition.
2Andreas Huyssen, Mapping the Postmodern in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism , Indiana University Press, 1986.