MARTIN HERBERT INTERVIEWS RONNIE HUGHES ABOUT HIS TOURING EXHIBITION ‘STRANGE ATTRACTORS’.

Martin Herbert: Perhaps we could start with a simple question: Why did you choose the title ‘Strange Attractors’ for this exhibition?

Ronnie Hughes: As some people might know, it’s a term from Chaos Theory. I’ve had a layman’s interest in science and science fiction for years. Attractors are determinants within a given system that cause it to take a certain kind of form, while a strange attractor is one that has a fractal dimension. It’s a sequential or mathematical relationship, in part, that I like to use as an analogue for what happens in the paintings. For years, chaos was something that people didn’t understand. It was mystical, immeasurable and awesome in a fearful way. The natural entropy that builds in a swinging pendulum was largely ignored by Newtonian physics until someone recognised that there is a pattern that goes behind things. That sense of a pattern running throughout existence is something that I have always been fascinated by.  It’s something that’s central, not just to art, but to all branches of human activity: to try to make sense of the mystical. But then there’s also this implied pun, that I see the paintings themselves as strange attractors because they are quite colourful and optically interesting, as well as there being a strangeness about why they exist.

MH: Something that is relatively consistent is that you work with geometry, but it’s a very humanised geometry: your grids are off and things that look very regular to start with have this humanised quality. Is that an autobiographical impulse?

RH: It may be. I had a very particular early life in terms of where I grew up. There’s no question that for anyone being creative, there are always forces that are trying to express themselves. I do feel that, even though I make abstract paintings, they are very definitely expressive. When I create a painting that I momentarily feel is successful, it’s usually because there’s a moment of tension in it. I’m always aware of the onset of a system falling apart, or of a sense of entropy or violence suspended, and that’s a recurring note in my work.

MH: Why circles, for example?

RH: There are a number of motif type things that happen in my work, such as geometrical lines, grids, triangles, circles, spheres and occasionally ellipses. To create an agency in people’s minds, you have to create a figurative situation. I used to make these lozenge or ovoid type shapes, which I think came from the west of Ireland landscape. I see circles as primary shapes that are very nonreferential, but they start off as a kind of pulse point. When you paint a particular colour, it’s there as a kind of energy. Colour is a very important aspect of my work and colour is always very relational; it doesn’t exist by itself. Certain hues become notes that you can’t deal with. You have to make things more subtle or nuanced, shift them sideways or make them come alive in some way.

MH: Your works have the feel of diagrams that don’t explain anything and that unravel as you look. There’s quite a lot of doubt in these works. Is this personal or universal?

RH: I was born in 1965 and there was this sense, in the books I read as a kid, of a futuristic utopia. I used to fantasise about Disneyland, where you could find hover-rail trains, automated robots and so on. I was also an avid Star Trek fan. I take pleasure in diagrams and graphic designs from the 1960s, which manifest in the work, but are counterbalanced. I often create structures and expectations but then undermine them. I paint something that looks like a grid, then you realise it’s not a grid at all – it’s been knocked sideways in some way. I think painting, compared to many other artforms, is very slow, in terms of how it’s made, but also in terms of its reception. Ideally, you’d like to be in front of a painting time after time and let it unfold in different ways. That’s the way I make paintings, hoping that they will unfold in that way, but accepting that people don’t always have the chance to experience them like that.

MH: How do you start a new painting?

RH: When I was younger, I would start with an idea or an intention, but that doesn’t really happen too much anymore. It’s quite random in some ways. I usually work with wood now, and there may be little glitches on the wood, so that’s enough for me to see if there’s a pattern between the notches. I’ll mark them and draw lines between them or separate them and that’s how it starts. In my paintings, there could be all sorts of layers happening underneath the finished surface. I work in a certain way that means I can pour paint over the surfaces so I can suppress things completely. I’m always fishing around, waiting to find something. If it doesn’t work out, you can sometimes turn it in another direction and find interest elsewhere.

MH: Do you have a consistent process?

The thing about the process is that you can’t decide to make a specific painting, because you can’t even imagine it at that stage – it hasn’t previously existed in any way, even as an idea. I have a painting wall in my studio and I work on multiple paintings at once. What looks like a random bunch of colours, I’ll often fret over for months, trying to get certain shades that appear in a balanced sequence. Painting is very much about material. The main thing that’s special for me about painting is the haptic experience and the touch quality of someone making something. I very much feel that a painting is a handmade object. It’s very different from seeing a reproduction of an image on a screen. I’m interested in play when I’m painting. There are not really tremendous rewards from being an artist a lot of the time, but one of the greatest rewards is when you can be involved in your own work – that’s a fantastic and important aspect: to spend time doing what you enjoy.

MH: The classic question: how do you know when a painting is finished?

RH: Very few paintings are safe forever. If they come back to the studio, they can often be changed. These days, I typically stop working on a painting for six months before I let it out of the studio. If I’m in the studio and I feel that I’m doing something habitual then I’ll try and knock it sideways, spoil it or add something, to try and give me a different set of obstacles to work with. The problem is that after a certain length of time you can’t but help end up making things that look like your work, no matter how hard you try to avoid it! But that’s a paradox that most artists have to deal with.

MH: You live in rural Sligo, yet the colours in your recent paintings are very synthetic and almost deliberately artificial. When and how did this element enter your work?

RH: When I moved to Sligo first, all these forms, shapes and colours from the landscape came into my work. I didn’t really recognise it at the time, but I can see it very clearly now. Over the last eight years, the work is just getting more artificial in terms of the colours and the colour relationships. When I made the switch from working with oil paints to using acrylics, my main focus for a while was making them look like they were oil paintings, which I realised one day was quite ridiculous. I’m interested in this idea of plasticity and using a plastic medium, so at one point I just decided to be a bit braver about the colour that I would use.

MH: Are you interested in acknowledging known paradigms in abstract painting?

RH: Sometimes you make things and they look like other people’s work. This is often problematic within abstract painting. Sometimes you pitch things and then subvert them, and other times you do it completely subconsciously. Occasionally, you see other people’s work scream out at you; it’s a question of whether you can deal with that and you just have to make the choice on an individual basis.

MH: Am I right in saying that the most recent works in the show are all drawings?

RH: I typically can’t work on two things at one time. If I’m painting, I’m painting. I’ve been working quite intensely for a long time, so I took a break and decided to do some drawing. Drawing is interesting because you generate things in a different way. The drawings in this show are small scale and were made quite quickly. Some of the drawings may have taken up to a week to make, which is nothing compared to the five years it can take to bring certain paintings to fruition. For me, drawing and painting are separate, but drawing is implicit in painting anyway. It’s very difficult to get away from the idea of drawing.

Martin Herbert is a writer and critic living in Berlin. He is associate editor of ArtReview and a regular contributor to Artforum, Frieze and Art Monthly. Ronnie Hughes is an internationally-renowned Irish artist who lives in County Sligo where he is a lecturer in Fine Art at Sligo Institute of Technology.

Note

This interview is an edited version of a public conversation that took place between Ronnie Hughes and Martin Herbert on 15 April 2017 at The Model, Sligo. ‘Strange Attractors’ is curated and toured by The Model in partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. The project has been supported through the Arts Council’s Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme. The exhibition was previously presented at The Model (16 April – 22 June) and Limerick City Gallery of Art (29 June – 27 August) and will show at the RHA, Dublin, from 7 September to 22 October 2017.

Images used: Ronnie Hughes, Badass, 2016, acrylic co-polymer on canvas, 119 x 112 cm. Ronnie Hughes, ‘Strange Attractors’ installation view, The Model, Sligo (left to right): The Space Between,  Detonate,  Propus I-III.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH MAGILL ABOUT HER PAINTING PRACTICE.

Joanne Laws: Can you describe your studio setting and your painting routine?

Elizabeth Magill: My studio is in a complex with other artists run by the organisation ACME in East London. It’s a 700-square-foot white cube with light coming in from the south and looking onto Mill Row, a narrow one-way street shadowed by a four-storey brown brick and grey concrete block of council flats, built in the 1970s. I’ve been here for a long time, so I’m used to this view. I like its low-level visual interference. I also have a smaller workspace on the Antrim coast, but when I’m there, I just seem to stare at the beautiful views overlooking the sea. My routine is intermittent, as I am often running around doing other things. I’ve had more condensed studio periods in the past, when I’d work for at least six days a week, sometimes working all day and into the night, but this isn’t me anymore.

JL: I read somewhere that you don’t necessarily refer to yourself as a landscape painter and yet a lifelong commitment to landscape is evident in your work. What national landscapes do you tend to draw on, if any?

EM: I’m preoccupied with the genre of landscape as a way to explore the language of art, the possibilities of painting and ideas around personal biography. For me it seems to offer a space to try to think about the bigger picture and what it means to be a part of this world. The landscape that enters into my work mostly comes from the geographic features around the Glens of Antrim where I grew up. This seems to have provided me with some kind of a visual backdrop. This particular corner of Ireland is scenically quite beautiful but the history there often seems at odds, or in conflict, with this natural beauty. The late, great John Berger, in his last publication, Landscapes: John Berger on Art, wrote: “Sometimes a landscape seems less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place… landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal”.

JL: Which aspects of the traditional landscape-painting canon interest you most?

EM: There are many artists that I admire who specifically fall into this more ‘traditional’ category of landscape painting. To name a few I’d include Van Gogh, Cezanne, Turner, Courbet, Munch, Balka, Constable, Whistler, Corot and many nineteenth-century Russian artists, especially Levitan. I also really like the landscape paintings of Kurt Schwitters, when he lived in rural Norway after fleeing Nazi Germany. Contemporary artists I like whose paintings also embody landscape include Per Kirkeby, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Richard Long, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili, perhaps Keifer’s early works, Mamma Andersson and Neo Rauch. But I’m just as interested in photographers, especially Annelies Strba, Thomas Struth and some Victorians such as Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Clementina Hawarden.

JL: Literature, particularly Irish literature, is an art form that has grappled with the complexities of landscape over time. Does this influence your work at all?

EM: With my photographic and printing interests, and my use of several different mediums, I try to create a sense of hybridity in my work, so it can’t be easily contained in one discourse. Experimental modernist Irish writers Beckett and Joyce have hugely influenced my thinking with their incredible talent for holding onto the structure of their stories whilst seemingly throwing them up in the air. It’s this confidence with language, mixed with a healthy disregard and a love of the medium, that I try to emulate. Other books that have enriched my thinking, especially in relation to landscape, could be described as semi-wanderings or journalistic observations.

I Crossed the Minch by Louis MacNeice was a commissioned travel book he undertook in the spring and summer of 1937 when visiting the Western Isles of Scotland. It turned out to be a kind of irreverent jaunt. However, contrasting the physical and emotional difficulties MacNeice encountered, he concludes his book with an incredibly moving poem, On Those Islands, which transforms the harshness he experienced into a profound portrayal of a people and their all-but-vanished culture at the water’s edge. Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees and The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald also relate to travel, both geographic and of the mind. I also enjoyed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Truman Capotes’s In Cold Blood, J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, Flannery O’Connor’s, Wise Blood and Adam Nicholson’s, Sea Room. I like the way these writers create a strong sense of place, evocatively but firmly rooting the reader in another world.

JL: For me, your landscape paintings often feature startling, unnatural or even supernatural elements: an ominous glow, an implied explosion or stray components such as a synthetically-coloured tree. Is there a sense that you are trying to subvert or break away from the tranquillity (and historical baggage) of the pastoral scene?

EM: The startling or supernatural elements you refer to may just be a signature of temperament. I’m not sure. I guess I’m attracted to contrasting elements and pivotal times of day, like dawn or dusk, where one could easily tip into the other; the darkness threatening to consume the light, or vice versa. For me this sets up some sort of visual friction or the potential for events to unfold. It seems to me that, as night falls, the sky can often appear so bright, in stark contrast with the darkness of the land. It’s always a real struggle for me to bring my work into a place that fully resonates with how I feel, think and interpret the world. I try to create a percussion of different elements that coexist. I like the finished work to somehow appear open to possibility, but finite too.

JL: There is an almost batique-like quality to some of your recent paintings, with the surfaces resembling cracked wax, while other works employ printmaking processes. As a painter, how do you approach surface?

EM: The surface of the work is something that can hold visual attention and perhaps meaning. The texture is a fully integrated part of the painting and yet a separate thing in itself. It is achieved through a build-up of diluted oil paint and mark-making, often over many months, sometimes years, until I reach a sense of place or something semi-believable to continue working with. The canvas never feels complete until this surface quality becomes a visual entity in itself. With recent works, I’ve created another type of surface by using silkscreen printing on top of the painted canvas. With this introduction, I’ve found direct ways to incorporate my photographs into the painted area. This in turn sets up a dialogue between painting and the photographic image or blurs the boundary between the two genres.

JL: Architecture and figures are rarely depicted in your landscapes. Is this a deliberate focus on the awe-inspiring vastness of nature beyond a more humanised scale?

EM: Although my work is perceived as uninhabited, figures and buildings often appear. I try to work with these elements in such a way that they don’t become too dominant a feature. I find that if a manmade structure or figure is the main focus of attention, the overall work can be compromised, with the landscape becoming secondary or a backdrop for some implied narrative. However, a number of years ago I visited the studio buildings that Henry Moore had built in the village of Much Hadham, in Hertfordshire, England, known locally as ‘Hogsland’. I find studios are like centres where thoughts and art can form internally. Perhaps inside an artist’s head, there’s a ‘studio’ of thoughts going on all the time. In 2016, I completed a painting titled Hogsland, placing the structure of Moore’s studio building at the centre of my canvas like a hub of ideas. This train of thought also had some influence with the title of my upcoming touring exhibition ‘Headland’. Headland is a geographical landmark (often seen from a distance) that, for me, also represents the mental processes that go on in one’s mind.

Elizabeth Magill was born in Canada, raised in the North of Ireland and lives in London. She is represented by Anthony Wilkinson, London, and the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

Magill’s solo exhibition, ‘Headland’, is curated and toured by Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) in partnership the RHA, Dublin, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. The project has been supported through the Arts Council’s Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme. The exhibition will launch at LCGA on 8 September 2017, with an introduction by Dr. Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. The exhibition will subsequently be presented at the RHA from 18 January 2018 and the Ulster Museum from May 2018 onward. The artist will be in conversation with Stephen Snoddy on Saturday 9 September at 12 noon in LCGA.

elizabethmagill.com

Images used: Elizabeth Magill, Headland, 2016–17, oil and silkscreen on canvas; image courtesy Hugo Glendinning and the artist. Elizabeth Magill, Along, 2016 –17; image courtesy of the Wilkinson Gallery and the artist.

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Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, 15 April – 17 June 2017

The American street photographer Gary Winogrand said of his work: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in a photograph”. I thought of Winogrand and of this quote when visiting Mark Swords’s exhibition, ‘The Living and the Dead’, at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (TBG + S), as it could be said that Swords paints pictures to see what his world looks like through painting. Swords uses his everyday life as his inspiration for the show. The paintings are about things that surround him, “things that are consciously or unconsciously always present”.  Drawing on daily observations, he collects images of bric-a-brac from charity shops, his young daughter’s toys and drawings, as well as the objects and paraphernalia that surround him in the studio. All these elements are utilised in a playful manner and are presented as two large wall pieces that contain myriad visual ideas and painting approaches. These wall pieces are held together through his use of a wallpaper-style striped background on one wall and large black painted sheets on the other.

The work operates extremely well in the gallery space. Two large assembled painting pieces draw the viewer in to examine their individual elements, perhaps in the way that one might pick through a charity shop, searching for little gems. The individual paintings are equally engaging, with a theatrical motif running through the works. Stages, sets and costumes are all referenced in the paintings. Much like theatre, the show itself is an immersive experience. According to Swords, the installation should be a place that brings elements together – narrative, colour and pattern – and where “everything becomes a play”.

There is great attention given by Swords to pattern and pattern-making within the work. Echoes of Matisse can be seen in these paintings, yet it could be argued that the work challenges one of Matisse’s aesthetic positions: that “a work of art must be harmonious in its entirety”. In Swords’s work, composition and pattern-making are often in conflict with each other. One such example is Stock Required Urgently Please, a painting within a painting surrounded by other paintings. It creates a visual cacophony, an excess of pattern and design which is complimented by the more muted works on show. In these works, colour is redacted in a similar manner to the text pieces that he writes and then paints out.

The assemblage of the paintings within the tableau seems carefully considered. I wonder if Swords might have purposefully blacked out paintings as he went, in order to make them fit within the assemblage? If so, it was a fruitful exercise in considering the function of a painting within the larger scheme of an exhibition. The salon hang also avoids any obvious hierarchy among the paintings. The viewer can engage with the work from any position, while a connecting narrative is alluded to between the paintings.

The paintings could be described as ‘faux naïve’, a style that has trended for a number of years largely through a resurgence of interest in the work of artists such as Forrest Bess and Etel Edan. It can be also seen in the work of Tal R and other international artists. The aesthetics of Outsider Art and its impact can be observed among the work emerging from art colleges of late as well. Arguably, its popularity can be understood through its apparent ease of construction. However, Swords has a naturally elegant touch with paint, which indicates the depth of his skill with a material that not everyone can handle as effectively as he can.

The work asks the viewer to consider how we might see our everyday lives, how the smallest of incidents or observations can gain significance. The world that is conjured is one that acknowledges the fleeting nature of time. He creates a childlike view of an adult world. One particular painting, Family Magic Show, seems charged with this view. The magician waves from the depths of a child’s imagination, now carefully captured through the eye of the adult artist. The quality of children’s drawings, imbued as they are with a sense of joy and freedom, are also captured in the large painting Tapestry, where a child’s fantasy is played out complete with superman and glittery fairy costumes.

The exhibition title ‘The Living and The Dead’ makes reference to James Joyce’s story The Dead, but another writer that springs to mind when viewing Swords’s work is Seamus Heaney, in particular his book The Human Chain, in which he reflects on the fleeting moments that shape our lives and our connections to each other: “A letting go which will not come again”. The title seems apt when one considers the everyday subject matter that Swords draws on to create narratives within the work. It reminds us that we are in a constant dialogue with our surroundings and that they continually confirm our existence in the world.

Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.

Image: Mark Swords, ‘The Living and the Dead’, installation view; image courtesy of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and Peter Rowen

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Ulster Museum, Belfast, 10 February – 3 September 2017

There’s an implicit understanding of the museum’s finite resources and loaded remit when viewing a permanent collection show. The limited pool from which these exhibitions are curated often leads to a loose circle being drawn around the works, its content used to simultaneously demonstrate and educate. It becomes a balance of signposting and illustrating, where singular artworks are laden with significance, denoting the development of an artist’s full career or even those of their peers. When seen repeatedly in different configurations, pieces can easily be experienced as historical artefacts rather than artworks.

The spectrum of contact an audience will have with a permanent collection is huge, yet heightened exposure to works does no favours for broad exhibition making. The influence of international art and modernism on Irish work is such an all-encompassing premise that I struggled to experience this exhibition distinctly from past and even surrounding shows. If previously unseen by a viewer, it would still be difficult for 31 works to ‘fulfil’ the vast reach of the exhibition’s title. Instead they become like stills representative of an unknown, feature-length film: not demonstrative but signalling something that could be more thoroughly explored, should you be so inclined.

The exhibition is loosely organised both chronologically and thematically, with each work contextualised by a short text. This format often connects the paintings with artistic influences, perhaps a fellow artist who is more widely known than the one presented. Some blurbs are repeated across more than one artwork, some not; others feature trivia that’s irrelevant. In trying to strike a balance between justifying the placement of works and highlighting important connections for the uninitiated, the effect is focused for some clearly key artists, but is listless in places. It abandons continuity – perhaps rightly – and places many of the works at the edges of various historical art movements.

The first space showcases artistic departures from figuration and landscape into Cubism, Impressionism and Fauvism, most prominently by Mainie Jellett in Seated Female Nude and Abstract, and Roderic O’Conor in View of Pont-Aven and Field of Corn, Pont-Aven. This selection is punctuated by some of Jellett’s more abstract paintings, with the volume of work allowing for some cross-comparison within her wider practice, and, to a lesser extent, that of O’Conor. A Cubist influence segues further into Patrick Swift’s Postiano, Mary Swanzy’s Samoan Scene and William Scott’s Aloes, where modernism’s freedom from strict representation shows the joy and alien brightness of botanical scenes.

On the other side of the gallery, William Scott’s Brown Still life and Antoni Tapies’s Peinture Verte counterbalance the explosive forms and colours of these tropical works. Yet they are visually echoed in Patrick Scott’s Yellow Device – painted in 1962 in protest at the testing of nuclear bombs – where paint is dripped on raw canvas in the colour field tradition. This painting is an example of how a limited permanent collection can find contemporary relevance through its own historiographic process of being housed in a museum environment. It’s a work that, through its political basis, shows more potently a passage through the chronology of this collection, and a ‘defanging’ that occurs in pictorialisation. The painting itself (and now its content) has become normalised – a marker for where history repeats itself. This process is echoed in Michael Farrell’s Presse Series with Cream. Palestinian flag colours are put through a juicer in a weirdly glib, pop-like abstraction, producing a reduction of then-current (and recurrent) politics.

Yellow Device marks an abandonment of mini-demonstrations of career-arcs and personal relationships between artists, and into singular American colour field and then place-based work. The latter is seen in Sean Scully’s painting Fourth Layer, Tooley Street, G.L. Gabriel’s S-Bahnhof Friendrichstrasse and Willie Doherty’s Apparatus. Unfortunately this isn’t capitalised, especially Doherty’s photographic works, deadening the alienation within them. Morris Louis’s Golden Age and Kenneth Noland’s Crystal show a process of object making that assimilates paint and canvas. They also offer colour field connections with William McKeown’s Untitled (2005), which is based on morning light, seemingly the crossover point of these themes. This particular painting’s abstracted and unfamiliar coolness of place is a deft counterpoint to the warmth underpinning the foreign scenes in the first room.

Yet, while the exhibition commences by showcasing a forward-thinking art collection in the mid twentieth century, it gradually trails off. It finishes with the recent acquisition of I Overslept Until the Evening by Makiko Kudo. Under the exhibition theme, this work by a Japanese artist could be perceived as an aposiopesis on future Irish art influences, or a general loosening of influence to embrace introspection and alternative avenues of pop culture. As a whole, ‘International Ireland’ does what it sets out to: it ‘showcases’, yet its broad parameters seem self-defeating. However, certain artworks offer glimpses into how a more forthright use of the history-making function of museum collecting might offer a heightened sense of urgency for new and familiar artwork – and visitors – alike.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast.

Image: ‘International Ireland: Irish & International Art from the Ulster Museum Collection 1890 – 2016’, installation view; image courtesy of the Ulster Museum

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Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 25 April – 22 July 2017

Painting, despite the implied immediacy of the title, doesn’t happen all at once. Between them, the nine gallery artists here – not all primarily painters – have been doing it for about 150 years. For the viewer, it can be a slow game too, that exclamatory ‘NOW’ perhaps better phrased as ‘now and then and again’. Currency aside, the more specific thing shared by this eclectic grouping is the room itself – a very large, overtly raw gallery space overlooking the rapidly changing landscape of Dublin’s Docklands. Ramon Kassam’s Gallery (2015) is a predominantly white acrylic painting on two unequally-sized linen panels. In black vinyl lettering near the top of the right-hand panel, the word ‘gallery’ appears. Below it, the artist’s name wraps around onto the left panel, in the distinctive style of the gallery logo. As the subject of the painting becomes the wall it hangs upon (so to speak), we’re reminded of how paintings can obscure reality, while feigning to show us things as they really are.

If Kassam’s painting is gallery-bound, Mark Joyce often breaks free of such contexts. Joyce’s work appears as painted panels in a Connecticut woodland (staged at the Albers Foundation in 2007) or as a series of coloured columns on a motorway interchange in south Dublin, Wave (2009). The Ballyconnell Colours (after Dermot Healy) (2017) consists of variously coloured bands on unprimed linen. Rainbow-like curves are painted and repainted, creating a kaleidoscopic effect, as though refracted through a series of second thoughts. Made with pure pigment, charcoal and animal fat, two drawings by Nigel Rolfe are the products of live performances in Poland and France. Like Kassam’s Gallery, their titles appear as pictorial content within the work, their respective phrases, Hide in Dark Corners (2017) and Democracy is Broken (2017), repeatedly drawn and erased. On the gallery’s concrete floor, an unlisted work consists of a sheet of paper with a black spiral motif. Objects around it – bowls of pigment, a measuring jug, a wrapped stick – testify to actions we might witness or conjure in our heads.

While John Cronin and Caroline McCarthy both make paintings with a certain wow factor, each artist brings a different approach to the act of painting itself. Reimagining everyday materials, McCarthy seems all about control, the verisimilitude of her painted tapes on canvas allied to a conceptual acuity. Her two small acrylic paintings, Bloom, Bloom and Cascade (both 2016) are remarkably accomplished. Cronin, in some respects, is about the loss of control, his liquid paint smeared and poured across vast, smooth surfaces. Cronin’s ZXX NO.13 (2016) is characteristic of his recent RHA show, its veils of oil paint arrested like a translucent screen-grab, or a blown up, microscopic slide.

Cronin’s title refers to anxieties around technologies of seeing. A short video work by Mary Fitzgerald is called Canthus (2016), a word denoting the corner of the eye, hinting at another kind of optical anxiety. Presented within a picture frame, a fixed shot of a misty headland gradually dissolves and reconstitutes. First shown at the Crawford Gallery in the company of paintings by Paul Henry, it seems out of place here, its play of correspondence lost in this setting. Several of these artists have been showing with Green on Red since its halcyon days in Fitzwilliam Square. Fergus Martin’s paintings often looked their best there, the Georgian rooms a perfect foil for the naked exactitude of his painted oblongs. Untitled (2017) is almost three metres long, but only 41 centimetres high. On a fabricated aluminium panel, a silvery-grey area extends across the lower section and upwards at both ends to configure an elongated ‘u’. The work has a machined perfection, but I prefer his paintings on canvas. The unyielding metal support is like armour on skin: invulnerable but less seductive.

A two-part mural, Kavalier and Clay, was first presented in ‘Just Left of Copernicus’, Niamh McCann’s solo show at VISUAL, Carlow, in 2015. An Aer Lingus air hostess – like a figure from a Soviet propaganda poster – is emblematic of brighter horizons, but as the paint she’s made from drips down the wall, her sangfroid is quietly undone. On an adjacent wall, a more bamboozling figure rests, hooded, vaguely labial, transforming into a fish or a snake. Named after Michel Chabon’s 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, McCann’s habit of conflating narratives is not always easy to follow. Damien Flood is also inscrutable at times. The billowing shapes and bird-like forms of Avery (2017) drift across the shallow space of the canvas, opening up here and there, to a background of tumbling ovoids. Reminiscent of Joan Miro, an adroit juggling of the material and the illusionistic adds a surprising physicality to Flood’s laconic surrealism. In his second painting, a hard-edged triangle plays against softer forms. Suggesting cultivated difference, the title, Anomaly Garden (2017), might serve as well for the show overall.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Image: Damien Flood, Anomaly Garden, 2017, 150 x 125 cm.

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Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 5 –  27 May 2017

The relationship between rural Irish communities and the land is both pragmatic and poetic, played out through intimacy with its anatomy: fields, hedgerows, rights of way and historical provenance. Bernadette Kiely’s approach to landscape painting mines these psychological and physiological relationships as a site of labour, ownership and heritage. Traditional landscape painting tends to depict scenic views at the beginning or the end of the day, when people are absent and it is transformed into a form of poetry. For Kiely, daily labour provides inspiration in paintings that chronicle the cycle of farming life. In her recent exhibition, ‘Memory Needs a Landscape’, her subject is challenged by the most uncompromising grey shroud of a damp winter, which has encouraged an expansion in her stylistic range, evident in the inclusion of more abstracted and conceptually-based monotypes and more folkish and mystical paintings.

The exhibition breaks with the solid painterly compositions that signified Kiely’s past work as she steps into unknown territories of flattened perspectives, washed surfaces and diminishing layers of thin paint. The transition is tentative and not yet resolved, but its inherent risk bears out through the artist’s skill and consistency across the exhibition. In each work, the original sketch remains evident as it untidily structures the painted forms between lines of smudged charcoal, graphite and paint. The effect is raw, reflecting a theme of coming to terms with change and adapting to an altered landscape, both in life and in art. Silence, River Nore documents the effects of unrelenting rainfall obliterating the horizon of the riverbank. In No Fun Today, a flooded playground sits at the literal and metaphorical edge of town and appears to be silently drifting downriver. It Could Be Graiguenamanagh I brings old-fashioned Irish humour to temper frustration at increasingly mercurial weather patterns. In The Past is Present, it’s the Future Too, a farm gate and tarpaulin-covered mound are barely visible through mist and smoke, while the shadow of a farm worker stands by. It is neither poetic nor beautiful, but, without needing to be literal, it captures the damp monotony of an Irish winter.

A series of monotypes trace old ordnance maps with a convincing archival quality that implicates civil administration in the complex relationship between people and the land. The King’s River (and Church), Old Map Image I and II track a tributary of the Nore that once had seven working mills dotted along its banks. Shadow Trees I, Flooded Land II and V, and Ground, County Home denote an artform that sits somewhere between cartography and drawing, pulling the viewer into an intimate investigation of detailed marks. Though brittle and threadbare, they convey the importance of title deeds and rights to land.

Rising Water is the most surprising work, made from a deliberately naïve perspective in both an emotional and a graphic sense. Similar in function to an ordnance map, this work reflects the significance of recording geographic phenomenon for civic purposes. Embedded in the composition is key visual information outlining the vulnerability of the area to rising waters, marked out in the waterline on higher ground – knowledge that will be usefully referenced for drainage solutions in the future. Contrasting with this pictorial diagram, in Rising Waters, River Nore, Kiely has worked up an image of a flooded field with striking lucidity using only a minimal application of charcoal, white chalk and water. These works underpin the metaphysical aspect of Kiely’s approach to landscape painting and her implicit acknowledgement of the land as a precious and fragile resource.

More poetic and allegorical are several paintings that focus on the spaces between tracts of working land: the boundaries of farms, the banks of rivers and, in one painting, a distant image of the mythically-significant Sliabh na mBan. Agricultural superstition in Ireland is extant where farmers sprinkle holy water along the edges and corners of fields to prevent piseogs from ruining their crops and livestock. The co-existence of modern farming with these practices highlights the elemental and sometimes contradictory nature of how farming communities think and feel about the land. Kiely paints The Garden I, Fading Landscape and Fading Memories in soft-focus, with feathery trees and undergrowth blurred by a mystical haze. When compared to weightier paintings such as Welcome to Claregalway II, the world they depict gradually materialises, just as the otherworlds of Túatha de Dannan and Tir Na nÓg emerge in Irish mythology. Kiely has pushed her painting to a place that digs deep, trying to distinguish the intangible from the tangible. In doing so she creates a kind of visual doublethink in which collective memory, folklore and ritual are at odds with twenty-first-century farming, climate change and civil bureaucracy.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Image: Bernadette Kiely, No Fun Today, oil on canvas; image courtesy of the artist.

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Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 20 May – 1 July 2017

Writing a review of an exhibition means finding an angle, a perspective, a particular point of view from which to approach the work. In the case of ‘Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings’ this is particularly challenging, as Paul Winstanley’s recent work here is almost all about angles, perspectives and points of view, in the physical, rather than metaphorical, sense. The main gallery contains 10 paintings, while two preparatory drawings are located in the gallery office. Both their inclusion and location seem puzzling at first, but as with so many aspects of this exhibition, clarification only comes with further investigation.

Pieter Saenredam was a seventeenth-century Dutch painter who specialised in church interiors. A preparatory sketch of the Mariakerk in Utrecht made by Saenredam in 1642 (the final painting is missing) provided Winstanley with the starting point for this exhibition, and therefore the justification for including the preparatory sketches mentioned above. In fact, closer examination of these two works shows that Winstanley is already playing with perspective, choosing in one case a two-point perspective, in the other a one-point perspective.

From these drawings, Winstanley produced two paintings: while Lost is a re-creation, Faith After Saenredam (2016) is a re-imagining. In the latter, he includes a window and a tapestry known to have existed in the church. In doing so, he keeps to the same dimensions and uses gold leaf as Saenredam did, while maintaining the same clarity of line and muted palette.

With these four paintings alone, Winstanley is demonstrating how representational art is something of a misnomer. The painting never simply represents: it shows us reality from a new perspective. In this case, however, there is another angle to be considered: which reality is being represented? That of the Mariakerk, or that of Saenredam’s version of the Mariakerk? In fact, the Mariakerk was demolished during the first half of the nineteenth century, so Winstanley can only interpret or imagine Saenredam’s view of the church. With this in mind, his preparatory drawings add a further layer of dissimulation in the ostensible ‘truth’ of these works. The ground underneath the viewer becomes even shakier when we learn that Saenredam himself did not always respect the reality before him. He is known to have enlarged, heightened and broadened elements for greater effect.

Saenredam also played with the perspective of the viewer, according to Arthur Wheelock, of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, who points out, for example, that “the rapidly receding barrel vault in St. Anthony’s Chapel in the St. Janskerk in Utrecht … only works spatially when the viewer is situated at the proper distance point and directly opposite the vanishing point.”¹ This insight provides, albeit obliquely, a neat segue to another group of paintings in this exhibition – Apostasy (Enrapture), Apostasy (Drift) and Looking at Vermeer. – where Winstanley depicts viewers observing paintings.

In these works, the viewer (in the Kerlin) is looking at a painting (in the painting) from behind other viewers (who are depicted in the painting), conjuring a Chinese box effect which seems to ask: what does it mean to view? Are we drawn into the painting (within the painting) on its own merits, or is it the fact that someone else is looking at it that brings us in? Let’s be honest, who doesn’t feel more at ease, particularly in a gallery setting, when there are others present?

In the two Apostasy works, some of the viewers in the painting are moving – an effect created by Winstanley through blurring of lines, in strong contrast to the precision seen elsewhere. This highlights the static, single perspective of the image on view in the painting while simultaneously reminding us that we can move around to find other vantage points. Is it any wonder that this exhibition can feel vertiginous at times?

Looking at Vermeer (2017) feels less successful because it lacks this juxtaposition of motion and motionlessness, and indeed the remaining paintings add little to the delicious rollercoaster effect engendered by those discussed above. Metaphysic 1 and Metaphysic 2 do at least reference the gold leaf, which is an intrinsic element of the After Saenredam works, but Sunlit Birch is a jarring element that undermines the impact of the exhibition as a whole.

For a body of work, which at first appears classically representational and easily interpretable, ‘Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings’ is, in fact, a magnificent exercise in ambiguity. Even the title lends itself to multiple interpretation – the ‘after’ could mean both chronologically and as an homage. On reflection, the inclusion of ‘other paintings’ may well be a deliberate attempt to further confound the viewer, who is, after all, already being challenged on many levels. What’s one more spanner in the works, in an exhibition which is as layered as an optical illusion by Escher?

Mary Catherine Nolan is a Dublin-based artist with a background in linguistics.

Note

1. hnanews.org/archive

Image: Paul Winstanley, Looking at Vermeer, 2017, oil and gold leaf on gesso on panel, 66 x 55 cm; image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery.

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Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels , 3 June – 29 July

When J.K. Huysmans’s Á Rebours (Against Nature) was published in 1884, it was embraced immediately as epitomising the decadent movement in art and literature. The protagonist of this literary gem is the Duc des Esseintes, an aristocratic aesthete who withdraws from society into a self-made sanctuary of aesthetic beauty. Finding daylight unbearably shrill, the jaded, misanthropic Duc lives by night, staving off crushing ennui by spending all his time and money on obscure, extreme and perverted pursuits. The crepuscular world of Á Rebours came to mind repeatedly as I viewed ‘What We Do in the Shadows’, an exhibition at Almine Rech by the Irish artist Genieve Figgis. Several of the characters inhabiting Figgis’s paintings resembled the image I’d developed of Esseintes over the years: frail, sickly and effeminate, face pitted and pocked by absinthe consumption or syphilis. Moreover, several of the characters depicted in Figgis’s paintings share his penchant for transgressive sexual pleasure.

As well as Huysmans’s aforementioned novel, Figgis’s paintings conjure a constellation of other references. Stately homes decay along with the fading bloodlines that once inhabited them – their once opulent imperial chambers now inhabited only by ghosts. Several paintings capture the claustrophobia of drawing room life. I found the empty interiors and sinister landscapes particularly successful. At first glance, these compositions appear almost abstract, suggesting that they have emerged from a spontaneous process in which the artist has revelled in the jouissance of paint. One feels that they are the fruits of a physical grappling with materials from which the artist derived the upmost pleasure. In a previous interview, Figgis affirmed that nothing has been planned or contrived in any way; everything happens by chance. Figgis’s technical virtuosity was well demonstrated in this exhibition. Several new paintings were notably larger in scale than earlier works, making visible greater levels of detail regarding the range of techniques and methods employed: paint, in livid and juicy hues, is splashed, poured and dotted across the canvas; gestural swathes of mixing and marbling create biomorphic blobs; an array of striking surface textures evoke Surrealist decalcomania.

Although humour, even frivolity, are consistent features of Figgis’s paintings, there is also a preoccupation with the hypocrisy that distinguishes high society. One can see the tendency to focus on how the privilege of peerage doesn’t prevent one from being repugnant. It is perhaps this aspect of Figgis’s work that has resulted in so many viewing it as a response to colonial Irish history. One of my first impressions when first encountering Figgis’s paintings in 2014 was how they represented and reflected upon particular aspects of Irish history. Indeed, many have suggested that her paintings elicit a very particular Anglo-Irish atmosphere. While this is certainly the case, it would be a mistake to view these images as referring exclusively to any one particular socio-cultural context.

The show at Almine Rech certainly resonated as much with the Belgians as it would with any Irish audience. In fact, viewing the exhibition in the Brussels context seemed particularly apposite, with several paintings depicting courtly culture and seeming to summon up episodes from the chequered history of the Belgian Royal Family. In particular, I was reminded of episodes of the life of King Leopold II (1835 – 1909) who was known not only for his lavish palaces and monuments, but also for establishing a private fiefdom in the Belgian Congo. Between 1896 and 1906, Leopold made at least three million francs from this operation, which was illegally run as a private business, with forced labour used to extract tons of ivory and rubber. To assist in the process, the King employed a mercenary military police known as Force Publique whose brutality contributed directly to millions of deaths. In Belgium, Leopold was also very unpopular, not just because of these acts of genocide, but because he was viewed by many as an immoral philanderer. Just before his death in 1909, he married the 26-year-old courtesan with whom he had been living amongst the palm trees in one of his palatial glasshouses.

Another reason Figgis’s exhibition had such local resonance was the fact that several works seemed to echo those of James Ensor (1860 – 1949), one of Belgium’s most intriguing painters. Figgis acknowledged the importance of his legacy in her group portrait Ensor and Friends, and there is certainly much that connects their work. Both artists have a proclivity for the macabre; their paintings reveal the influence of Bosch and Breugel, Pre-Renaissance artists who prioritised the visceral and expressive over the idealised. Both Ensor and Figgis reinterpret art history on a personal level, aligning classical painting traditions with contemporary concerns. But what unifies these artists most – and what made Figgis’s show such a pleasure to view – is their inimitable ability to produce artworks of unnerving beauty: seductive and lurid scenes from which it can be a struggle to avert one’s gaze.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin.

padraicmoore.com

Image: Genieve Figgis, Pink stage, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 100 x 4 cm; courtesy of Genieve Figgis and Almine Rech Gallery.

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Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 1 June – 1 July 2017

Let me begin by confessing something: over the course of the last two years, I have interviewed Diana Copperwhite twice on camera. During those conversations, we barely touched upon the formalist ‘whats?’ of her paintings in an effort to avoid muddy dialogue. The filmed conversations were more centred around the general ‘whys?’ of painting and the painter, the nature and nurture of it all; painting as a verb rather than a noun. 

When I was asked to write a review of Copperwhite’s solo show, ‘Crooked Orbit’, at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery – which meant confronting the ‘whats?’ head on – I tossed and turned before accepting the invitation. What I discovered was that knowing the ‘whys?’ can colour your vision. But before we go there, first a description. (Note: I will not be doing an obligatory round-robin description of each and every painting in the gallery because when you describe one of Copperwhite’s paintings, you describe them all. Sounds harsh – a premature critique before the window dressing – but this is the case for most solo presentations of painting that lean on the side of abstraction. Painting like this defeats description).

Composed of around 10 paintings, ranging in scale from medium-sized to quite large (in Irish-painting-scale terms), the initial impression of Copperwhite’s new body of work is that there is little variation in application, tone, form and composition from one painting to the next. Like the way someone who is tone deaf to the nuances of ‘diddley-eye music’ might say: “It all sounds the same to me!” But such a musical analogy is not wasted here.

Like Mondrian’s jazz-inspired Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) or Kandinsky’s use of ‘compositions’, ‘impressions’ and ‘improvisations’ to title his paintings, Copperwhite also waxes lyrical with musical adjectives like ‘discordant’ and ‘harmony’ when describing the tensions and contrasts inherent in her paintings. But music is music and painting is painting, and when we discuss discordance and harmony in terms of antonyms, painting is not in the same unforgiving register as music. The visual register is more subjective, while noise is… just noise.

I notice straight away at Kevin Kavanagh that there’s no sign of Copperwhite’s signature paint-slapped portraits – those featureless faces of hers that I have gravitated towards in past solo shows as a stabilising visual anchor. Feeling ‘scrooged’ by their absence pushes me to search out some other orientating subject hiding under the fat duvets of Copperwhite’s corrective abstraction. But everything here is lost in suggestion, like mauled figures lying in post-coital beds. Everything is Ibid. So, I call upon some referential history to orient myself. If the orbit were straight, it’d be boring.

Broadly speaking, Copperwhite’s paintings augment postwar European and American painting and drawing. In her handling, however, the existentialism, expressionism and machismo of postwar famine-figuration, by, let’s say artists like Alberto Giacometti and Edward Hopper, have got all fat and luminous. Copperwhite’s figures aren’t collectively alone in a diner in Manhattan drinking coffee à la Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), or chiseled away to a nub of unmovable humanity in the manner of Giacometti. Copperwhite’s figuration pushes against wads of paint like a knuckle sandwich pressed against a pinscreen toy.

Virtuoso Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie comes to mind as a contemporary peer, but while Copperwhite is a miser of figurative detail and a miner of intuitive judgments, Ghenie provides a little more muscle and bone for our viewing pleasure. Copperwhite’s architectures cower under a deluge of colourful greys; her tubular spectrums and bundles of neon are smothered in a miasma of grey indecision and uncertainty, looking like New Politics.

Although there’s enough of those rocket thrusters of atomic tangerine and Nighthawks green neon to soak up at Kevin Kavanagh, sometimes I think there’s too much chance and intuition and not enough precision and control in Copperwhite’s approach (that’s why I believe the artist’s incisive paint-slapped portraits are an essential element in a solo presentation of her work).

The title of the exhibition forces a double-take on the ground below and the sky above – our place between. And then to daydream: I am a kid again, hovering in wonder above the planetary system colourfully illustrated in some smelly encyclopedia of yore, and imagining what it looks and feels like beyond the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. But Copperwhite’s paintings – although still indebted to a deep sense of wonder – are closer to the floor, closer to home, closer to the self.

On film, Copperwhite described a first memory in which she is reaching for a bundle of highlighters and her father blocks her approach. She then described what she perceived as an oppressive grey environment in contrast to the out-of-reach luminosity of the highlighters. Look familiar?

James Merrigan is an artist and art critic based in Waterford City. His film All or Nothing is also profiled in this issue of the VAN.

iamnotapainter.com

Image: Diana Copperwhite, Crooked Orbit, 2017, oil on canvas, 56 x 71 cm.

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MARK O’KELLY DISCUSSES ASPECTS OF PORTRAIT PAINTING IN IRELAND.

Early portraiture can be viewed as an historical instrument of class identification, patriarchal gaze and institutional hegemony. It could also be argued that, over the years, important significations of portraiture have been exploited and aesthetically challenged through the deconstructive approaches of key historical and contemporary Irish artists. This complex field has huge public appeal and carries immense prestige for artist and subject at the level of national identity, recognition and status.

The historical context for contemporary Irish portraiture and the breadth of current practice have been highlighted in a range of recent events: the Freud Project at IMMA; the reopening of the National Portrait Collection; and numerous high-profile portrait commissions by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), the National Gallery and the Hennessy Portrait Prize. The specific genre of portrait painting in Ireland has been largely sustained through the work of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). Such ongoing efforts to collect, exhibit and commission portraiture attest to the importance of the genre within many of this country’s most important institutions.

Irish portraiture has, by virtue of its practice, innovated the process of commissioning: practical fulfilment of criteria generally conveys the significance of the sitter’s esteem or office as part of a strategy to celebrate national life in general. At the same time, in a parallel postmodern development, the commitment to producing a likeness of the sitter has increasingly been dispensed with. The cultural context and the historical agency of the subject (portraiture itself), as a paradigm of political and social capital, have become the artist’s main frame of reference. In contemporary visual culture, pictures and portraits flatten out hierarchies of either fame or achievement and, in so doing, undercut linear approaches to the subject. Nowadays, the criteria determining achievement and notoriety are less clear cut. These conditions not only reprioritise the motivations behind choosing the subjects of portraiture but also drive practices of painting which utilise the image of the person to ends other than veneration and commemoration.

Archival Traditions

The commissioned portrait relates to the archive according to customs governing an index registrar of state. A good example is the commissioning of a portrait of every serving Taoiseach, producing a relatively simple customary requirement for the visual record of government. Reflecting the complexity of an evolving society, more complex commissioning criteria are now commonplace regarding the election of both sitter and artist. Consequently, in the field of portraiture today, public and private interests compete to register and authorise more socially inclusive and politically diverse figures of authority for commendation.

Historically significant and accomplished portrait paintings by Irish artists continue to convey a mastery of technical detail in describing the sitter’s likeness and the context of their achievements. Many officially commissioned portraits specify the accurate depiction of vestments, symbols of office and other regal insignia. Following in this tradition, Irish artists of rigour and commitment include Carey Clarke, James Hanley and Conor Walton – true image-makers in paint and perception who persist in innovation through distinct signature styles. Similarly, Mick O’Dea is a relentless portrait artist, but, in pursuing images beyond presidents and chairs, he has developed a more personal archive of portraiture. Through many projects of his own design, O’Dea has increased the circle of social inclusion in his eclectic and ever generous practice. O’Dea’s 2013 portrait of the artist Stephen McKenna (1939 – 2017) is a notably moving example of his ability to negotiate such paradoxes of affinity and affiliation. The painting gently acknowledges McKenna’s institutional legacy but primarily foregrounds his presence as an artist in a studio. Viewed from a similar moment of contemporary hindsight, Nick Miller’s affirmative portrait of the late Barrie Cooke (1931 – 2014) also provides an important historical record, not least in terms of friendships between artists. Miller’s Last Sitting: Portrait of Barrie Cooke (2013) conveys Cooke’s presence in a direct and uninhibited encounter and was awarded the Hennessy Portrait Prize in 2014.

By contrast, following the example of painters such as Lucian Freud, sitters often remain unnamed, the paintings testament to the artist as existential observer. However, Freud’s complex painting of Queen Elizabeth II is an exceptional work which contradicts this characteristic approach, driven to an extreme image realisation in his request that she suffer the duress of wearing the weighty crown of England for the duration of the sitting. It seems significant that 2016 – a year of Irish commemoration – saw the establishment of the Freud Project at IMMA. The portraits on show emphasise an Irish legacy to Freud’s oeuvre, much in the way that the transposition of Bacon’s studio to Dublin in 1998 reasserted an Irish dimension to post-war British figurative painting. In this way, the portraits themselves will no doubt deepen the dialogue surrounding the Anglo-Irish milieu depicted in Freud’s work, including familial histories, sporting achievements and other examples of cultural exchange between our neighbouring states.

In a survey of Irish portrait painting, globally accelerated and conflicting image-agendas are influential factors, especially when one considers the all-pervading presence of photography and digital imagery. In Colin Davidson’s 2015 painting of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: In Abstentia, commissioned for the cover of Time Magazine, we can observe many complex factors at work. The influence of Freud on Davidson is evident in his equivocation of the immediacy and materiality of paint. This painting is also a significant cultural landmark and succeeds in addressing subjects wider in scope than the depiction of person and place, expanding the structural paradigm of Davidson’s practice as painter-auteur. It functions as a point of origin for widespread mediation and signifies the dividing/unifying paradox of the European project as perceived by a Northern Irish artist. The portrait manifests the gendered artistic and political identities at stake in the performance of painting. Davidson’s heroic artistic project becomes the embattled lens through which East-German-born Merkel’s stabilising presence comes to be globally visible.

Geraldine O’Neill was commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland in 2015 to paint a portrait of the Hong-Kong-born fashion designer John Rocha. Rocha has lived in Ireland since the late 1970s and was awarded a CBE in 2002. In O’Neill’s full-length portrait, he is depicted informally in an interior setting that suggests a draped studio, consistent with O’Neill’s abundant paintings of brightly-coloured studio interiors, often warmly inhabited by family members. In this painting, O’Neill’s characteristically robust structuring of space and her use of a muted colour palette is attuned to Rocha’s minimalist sensibility. This mediates a conceptual alignment between divergent aesthetic agendas – linked to craft, surface and colour, as well as implied cultural transactions – that are highlighted through the depiction of Rocha’s materials.

Recent Commissions

Beyond the significant new portrait commissions by established Irish artists, younger artists are beginning to get a crack of the whip. The Hennessey Portrait Prize recently commissioned Gerry Davis – who won the 2016 award with his intimate portrait of fellow artist Seán Guinan – to make a portrait of All-Ireland championship hurler Henry Shefflin. The portrait was installed in the National Gallery – the first time a GAA player has ever been included in the collection. Davis is a forensically accomplished painter. In the two paintings cited, his range of focus, from close-up to infinite distance, conveys the ‘airspace’ inhabited by the subjects, lending a temporal poignancy of heroic melancholy.

Another artist who has made remarkable contributions to the expanded field of portraiture in Ireland is Vera Klute, who won the Hennessey Portrait in 2015. One of Klute’s most tender works is her official portrait of Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, commissioned by the National Gallery in 2014 in recognition of her life’s work as a campaigner for social justice. Klute was also invited to develop four new portraits for the RIA’s  ‘Women on Walls’, a commissioning project that sought to “make women leaders visible” through a series of new portraits. Klute’s sensitively observed portraits depict eminent historical Irish female scientists – the first female members of the RIA – elected in 1949 (164 years after The RIA was first established). 

Perhaps the most outstandingly original work of portraiture to be completed in recent years in Ireland is Blaise Smith’s group portrait, Eight Scientists (2016), also developed for ‘Women on Walls’. This painting has been the subject of much commentary and celebration, both for its technical accomplishment and the way in which it imaginatively communicates the spirit and personality of its subjects. Smith’s rationale behind the portrait was to promote notable achievements among leading female scientists in Ireland today. His composition is witty, original and skilful and is significant because it reinvents the genre of academic group portraiture according to our times. Each figure depicted in the painting appears to possess special powers, their dynamic research discoveries wielded bodily like magical totems, mythologising these female scientists as superhero archetypes – the ‘X-Women’ of Irish science.

Narrative Gestures

Aside from the conventional matrix of commissioning and the depiction of notable sitters, many Irish artists paint faces and figures as important central motifs of their practice. As in Freud’s works, the sitter is often unidentified and the historical model of the genre itself evoked for narrative and dialogical effect. Genieve Figgis is another prolific Irish artist who has become internationally recognised for her paintings, which make reference to the ‘big houses’ and landed gentry of imperial history. Anglo-Irish culture and literature frame Figgis’s work, pointing to familiar narratives of identity made ubiquitous through art and costumed period drama. Her work reimagines the art historical canon of portrait painting as a nightmare of darkly comic satires, in which Rorschach-style abstraction conjures figures of colonial whimsy according to the dictates of historical cliché. Her paintings appropriate from all manner of portrait iconology, subjecting the genre itself to a systematic evacuation of its contextual historical fetishes, biases and privileges.

Sheila Rennick is another iconoclast whose work addresses questions on how the human subject is approached in contemporary terms. In Rennick’s work, idiomatic likenesses and the durational process of optical analysis are dispensed with in favour of a gestural approach and palette, not unlike the aesthetic posture of Austrian painter and perpetual self-portraitist Maria Lassnig or the neo-expressionist Philip Guston. Characterised by freewheeling compositions, feckless improvisation and the abject application of thick impasto, Rennick’s loud and bawdy paintings are concerned with eliciting empathy for the marginalised subcultures she depicts. In her double portrait The Doggers (2014) – runner-up in last year’s Marmite Prize for Painting – the masked lovers return our judgmental gaze, in a composition reminiscent of a television screen, creating a fly-on-the-wall frame for deviant, alienated identities, made only partially visible to our world via broadcast media.

Mark O’Kelly is an artist who lives and works in Dublin and Limerick. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). His work is the outcome of a practice of research that explores the space between the photographic document and the cosmetic image.

markokelly.ie

Images used: Blaise Smith, Eight Scientists, 2016, oil on gesso panel; collection of the Royal Irish Academy; commissioned as part of Accenture’s ‘Women on Walls’ Campaign;  winner of the US Council/Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award 2017; image courtesy of the artist. Nick Miller, Last Sitting Portrait of Barrie Cooke, 2013; image courtesy of the artist and the National Gallery of Ireland. Geraldine O’Neill, John Rocha (b.1953), Designer, 2015, oil on linen; commissioned for the National Portrait Collection; image courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland. Shiela Rennick, The Doggers, 2014, acrylic on paper; image courtesy of Hillsboro Fine Art.

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