Review: 'It's a sensory overload' - Beyond Van Gogh has the wow factor

Four stars

Today’s immersive entertainment extravaganzas are all-singing, all-dancing, all-digitised affairs, and they are big business. At the tail of the money-making monster you might find a sad Oompa-Loompa. At the head, genuine game-changers such as ABBA Voyage. That show is currently mid-way through a three year run which is pulling in £1.5 million a week. Money, Money, Money as the song goes. Or perhaps it should be: Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

Near to the head of the beast if not quite at ABBA levels of cultural purchase are a suite of immersive multi-media shows dedicated to the heavy-hitters of the art world. Picasso and Monet have been so honoured, but for reasons nobody seems clear on the bulk of these events turn on the work of Vincent van Gogh. They are many in number and only ever slightly different in name.

Now one of them, Beyond Van Gogh, has settled down for a run at Glasgow’s SEC Centre. It’s the show’s first time in Scotland. The benefit to the host city is estimated at £2.5 million, and when it closes on August 26 it will have been the SEC’s longest single residency. Beyond Van Gogh has already toured 60 cities in the US and Canada, and in keeping with the mode of travel its subject would have used had he ever crossed the Pond, it arrived in the UK by boat.

Beyond Van Gogh. Picture: Gordon Terris (Image: free)

Born in the Netherlands in 1853, Vincent van Gogh died by his own hand in 1890 following long battles with poor mental health. But he left behind a series of paintings which are now among the most valuable on the planet, and a reputation as one of the few bona fide titans of Western art. That, and his favoured subject matter towards the end of his life, may explain his popularity with the producers of immersive entertainments such as this.

Visitors enter the show through a room in which huge, illuminated panels lay out the facts of van Gogh’s life, the words superimposed on close ups of his unmistakeable brush work.

We learn about his birth, his love of art, his decision to join the church, and his subsequent decision not to join the church but to travel instead to Paris in order to paint. He lived there with his art dealer younger brother, Theo. Then, in 1888, he made his fateful relocation to Arles in the south of France, where he hoped to set up an artists’ commune and where he painted many of his greatest work.

Alongside the panels are huge, gilt frames suspended from the ceiling. The show is TikTok-tastic and visitors are encouraged to grab any chance for a reel or selfie. There’s a soundtrack too. As I wander through, it’s a muzak version of Don McLean’s Vincent which is playing, though thankfully without the less-then-cheery lyrics (“Starry, starry night/Paint your palette blue and gray/Look out on a summer’s day/With eyes that know the darkness in my soul”). Later on there’s a violin and piano version to enjoy.

Not that the show shies away from the darkness. The delusions and psychotic episodes which plagued van Gogh are alluded to, but the point is to contrast that aspect of his life with the joy, symbolism and – most important for an event with this level of wattage – the light which is present in his work.

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There’s no mention of Alexander Reid here, but there’s a neat synchronicity to the show’s Scottish premiere taking place in the city of his birth.

As van Gogh fans will know, Reid was an influential European art dealer and a good friend of both Vincent and Theo. Journey a couple of miles to the south and you can see van Gogh’s portrait of Reid in the Burrell Collection where it’s currently on show in the museum’s Degas exhibition. Step a few hundred metres to the north from the SEC, and you’re on Minerva Street in Finnieston, close to Reid’s childhood home at 10 Minerva Place.

But while the Burrell Collection has an actual van Gogh painting, what it does not have is the element Beyond Van Gogh brings to the party and which is at the heart of its offering: the wow factor. It comes in the final, main room.

This is a huge space, rectangular in shape. The surrounding walls are like cliff faces and washing over it all are shimmering, ever changing images of van Gogh’s works. We see landscapes and streetscapes, those famous sunflowers, and in one sequence an array of the many self-portraits he undertook.

Stare long enough and you might catch Vincent blinking, just one element of the digital trickery deployed in the show. Another is the puff of smoke which emerges from a pipe, a third the way the artist’s trademark “Vincent” signature unfolds across a painting, as if his unseen hand is writing it in front of us.

Beyond Van Gogh. Picture: Gordon Terris (Image: free)
Cheesy? Perhaps. But it’s also startling – and being startled by art is one way to ensure an abiding interest in it. Besides, who’s more likely to go home and want to splash poster paint everywhere, the kid who gets dragged round Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum or the one who stands here gawping as a moving tableau of flowers sweeps across walls and floor then dissolves into sheets of colour? I know who my money’s on.

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The main space is carpeted, too. There are yoga sessions planned here for Saturday mornings, but the kind-to-the-bottom flooring also invites visitors to lie back. One man does just that when I visit, though whether from exhaustion brought on by sensory overload or just to commune better with the art isn’t immediately clear.

The ‘beyond’ in the title of the exhibition refers to the intention to take paying visitors into and through the images. Scale, light, sound and movement are the means – borrowings from, and enhancements of that sense of magic which cinema is so good at conjuring up. It works. We’re left feeling like someone has shrunk us to the size of Jelly Babies and catapulted us into a most unusual kind of screen-saver – albeit one which runs on an hour-long loop before nudging us gently towards the gift shop.