True Colour
Kevin Kavanagh gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
True Colour is an impressive collection of contemporary abstract painting, ranging across several distinct styles and visual genres within this art-historical category: there are geometric works, expressionist colour fields, organic landscapes and a sculptural intervention, rendered in a wide variety of sizes and scales.
Populating the show are luminaries such as the Irish artists Mark Swords and Eve O’Callaghan, as well as international artists such as Liliane Tomasko and Dannielle Tegeder.
Remarkably, lending a strain of historical authority to the exhibition, the curatorial team at Kevin Kavanagh have got their hands on an Evie Hone, painted in 1920, a year before she moved to Paris to study cubism with Mainie Jellett and four years before the pair’s landmark exhibition at the Society of Dublin Painters.
Though it belongs to her early period, Hone’s Composition is an already sophisticated work of abstraction that demonstrates the artist’s signature sensitivity to colour, in the guise of an elegant manifold that reminds one of a visualised musical score.
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Aidan Dunne’s engaging introductory text traces the show’s historical lineage, opening a path for understanding both the aesthetic and epistemological value of the visual language of abstraction. Referencing Monet and Cézanne, Dunne frames this exhibition’s artworks as a continuation of their late-19th century project, which formed the nucleus of modernism by breaking away from mimetic representational art.
Dunne calls on the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to demonstrate the value of this rupture: these artworks teach us that, “rather than looking at a painting,” he writes, “we must look with a painting”, evoking the sense that abstraction is a uniquely competent medium for investing the viewer with an the artist’s intimate reality.
This is certainly the impression conjured by Aileen Murphy’s striking What Colour Are Your Eyes in the Morning? Her painterly grammar is influenced by her background in dance and choreography, and her rhapsodic landscape is charged with a visceral, bodily component, as though a snapshot of the world as it starts to mutate, growing innards, organs and limbs. It’s a highly arresting piece, eliciting a physical, physiological response.
Tegeder’s lengthily titled Alchemy Verdant Converter of Dusk and Comfort Tincture Squares, Circuit Map, and Celestial Arrangement with Solar Enchantment Routes is on the opposite side of the spectrum, stylistically. This is a conceptual exercise in design, synthesising the aesthetics of hardware circuitry boards, engineering schematics and quasi-astrological symbolism, creating a syncretic map of meaning that remains elusive in its message.
In contrast to the two-dimensionality of Tegeder’s large-scale diagram, O’Callaghan furnishes her work with another axis, tilting her construction into the viewer’s space. Shadow Painting #5 is composed of two circles, bounded by stainless steel: the inner shape is saturated with a terrestrial orange, a colour somewhere between terracotta and burnt umber. It brims with warmth, as though pulsing with its own slow heartbeat, imprisoned within a metal perimeter.
Proof of abstraction’s continuing capacity to challenge, surprise and stir something profoundly within.
True Colour is at the Kevin Kavanagh gallery, Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
