Reviewed
Blue, Sean Shanahan, Kerlin Gallery until November 17th (01-6709093)
Where the Horses Walk, Pat Harris, Taylor Gallery until Nov 17th (01-6766055)
The Possibilities of Stillness, Bridget Flannery, Ashford Gallery until Nov 15th (01-6617286)
Michael Lyons, Wood Block Prints, Graphic Studio Gallery until Nov 10th Landscapes and Seascapes, Sean Fingleton, Temple Bar Gallery until December 1st (01-6710073)
Sean Shanahan's work usually has the air of guarding itself against its architectural settings. That is, it looks as if it will flatter the architecture, but also disarm its capacity to impact on the painting.
The art of painting has a complex, inextricable relationship with architecture. It cannot get away from it. It is both dependent on and resentful of it. It learns from but can transform it. It has to pay it much more attention than it might wish. Or it can ignore it and insist that the conditions of the architecture follows on from the conditions of the painting.
For all its apparent calmness and simplicity, in the work of Sean Shanahan you get the feeling that no painting is more micro-managed, more parsed and analysed, more worried about with a fretful, neurotic concentration. One can readily imagine Shanahan waking up in the middle of the night with a start and thinking: No, the edges are about a millimetre too wide. But it is surprising to encounter his description of how his current Kerlin Gallery show, Blue, came about. He dreamt that he visited an exhibition of his own work and, on waking up, set about recreating the work he had seen in his dream.
The result: a series of painted MDF panels, monochrome except for twin unpainted bands forming vertical margins in each one. Proportions and scale vary, but the dominant emphasis is vertical. This, together with those flanking bands, suggest a series of doorways and windows, and offer us a way in. When the proportions accentuate the horizontal, the effect is quite different. Although in theory there is actually more space for our eyes to explore, the paint becomes very much a surface rather than a space. It is an uncompromising, intriguing show.
While Shanahan's work isn't exactly about what you can leave out, it certainly concerns itself with the problem as a means to an end, as does that of Pat Harris, at the Taylor Gallery, working towards quite a different end.
For several years now, Harris has been pruning and editing the content and means of his work. Earlier on, he did a great deal of portrait and figure paintings, and, in a way, he has been dealing latterly with what is left when the head and the body are taken away.
The show's title, Where the Horses Walk, implies just such a preoccupation. Several paintings and drawings depict an open grass space where the horses of the title exercise. We see not horses but the circular pattern of impacted earth and mud that they have created. This ghostly motif persists throughout the seasons. It is an explicit treatment of an idea broached more indirectly in Harris's other landscape work, both in Belgium, where he is based, and in Co Mayo, where he has spent much time. The vast expanses of north Mayo bogland are mute witnesses to layer upon layer of human habitation. In the still life, he takes symbols of transience: flowers and fruit and vegetable gourds. A bid to capture the intensity of the rose dissolves into a blur of memory. And this is pretty much the result of any and all such bids to get at the essence of a thing. Empty spaces, the seasons, the ghostly traces of things: Harris handles all this material with restraint and subtlety.
Bridget Flannery is clearly a good painter whose work, for some reason, often fails to reflect the true measure of her abilities. In The Possibilities of Stillness, at the Ashford Gallery, titles and works refer to external and internal imaginative landscapes. The big spaces, shifting light and the textures of a shoreline landscape seems to underlie all of the pictures.
Flannery builds up compositions in blocks of muted, atmospheric colour on the basis of a right-angled grid. She likes, and is well able for, extreme tonal variations, throwing in a dense, dark wedge to dramatically enliven a pale image, for example, without upsetting its equilibrium; and her colour sense is equally sure. In many respects, her pictorial language is almost as rigorous and intense as Sean Scully's.
Yet there is a feeling that she is keeping herself in check, making something more contained and compromised than her abilities would allow, so that what is a perfectly good show might have been something much more.
Michael Lyons's work at the Graphic Studio Gallery features the plates from a collaborative book (with Pat McCabe), Ecce Huer, plus other wood block prints. All of the work has in common a lively interest in the texture of city life and a respect for a tradition of fine draughtsmanship. These qualities extend directly back to the work of George Grosz and other of the German Expressionists, and to Alfred Doblin's great novel of life, politics and the city, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Perhaps Lyons comes to them via Mick Cullen, whose Berlin work draws on Doblin, and by Charles Cullen's acerbic take on Dublin. All of the work is teeming with life and brilliantly conveys the city as a melting pot of personal, public, economic and political worlds.
Sean Fingleton's impassioned landscape studies at Temple Bar Gallery are distinguished by their fierce honesty. They are also high-risk performances and Fingleton sets out to deal unambiguously with the clamorous here-and-now of the landscape flinging itself against the senses. Sometimes, as with the Crashing Waves, Greystones, he achieves a close to archetypal description of something universally recognisable. On other occasions, his liking for heightened, strident colours can add to the drama without grounding it in the material world.
