This show was my first chance to see an installation work by John Scott outside Toronto, where he lives. Scott made his name in Canada with big, smudgy drawings of advanced military machines and futuristic cars doing their stuff while seeming to emanate darkness. In the drawings’ margins, he would often scrawl bits of forbidding nomenclature and technical data. These images strike an anxious response in anyone who reads newspapers, but they are particularly compelling to Canadians, who tend to view the growth of American military “deterrence” as dangerously undeterred. Recently Scott has returned

Simon Edmondson’s paintings are educated work. They are loaded with respectful allusions to artists he evidently admires, from Frank Auerbach (Asleep in the Daytime II, 1984) and Oskar Kokoschka (Alternatives, 1983–84) to Philip Guston and Christopher LeBrun, who seem to haunt everything he makes. Edmondson plainly understands painting as a process of assimilation, for there is a colleaguely feeling about all his adaptations of technique and image-handling from other artists. If his influences do not yet seem fully digested, it should not be surprising. He is a young artist—29 years old—who