ART REVIEWS/ AIDEN DUNNE: Paul Doran, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until March 13th Joseph O'Connor, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until March 2nd Donald Teskey: Not Only Forms, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until March 6th
It's as if Paul Doran's works are very big paintings wrapped up in small parcels, museum-scale epics compacted into portable blocks. The largest is 42 centimetres square, the standard size is just over 30 centimetres square, but each square, of linen stretched over board, is packed and built up with layer on layer of pigment to become an impossibly thick, clotted mass of colours, bulging and sagging and straining.
The paintings are like collapsed stars harbouring prodigious quantities of matter and energy or, more prosaically, fantasy cream cakes, inviting but parodically excessive. They draw you in but also perplex you. There is something toylike about them, with their bright, cheerful colours, but they are not particularly decorative objects. They are just too much for that, too extreme.
At the time of his National College of Art and Design graduate exhibition, in 1997, Doran was to some extent in thrall to a painter whose work he still admires, Howard Hodgkin. Doran was himself prolific and very capable, but there was something missing in the vivid colour compositions he was turning out at the time. With the clarity of hindsight we can see that what was missing was a centre of gravity that would hold the paintings together, that would anchor them and allow them to become substantial things in their own right. Again in retrospect one can see him rigorously testing the limits of his painterly world in the work made after graduation. But it wasn't until he was completing his MA that something really clicked.
It was at this point, with a nod towards process painting, that he began to make small, incredibly dense, concentrated works, consisting of accumulated heaps of pigment that overhung the edges of the canvas and sagged under their own weight. Oil paint takes a long time to dry, and the thicker it is the longer it takes. The masses of paint Doran has applied will not fully dry during his lifetime. It forms a skin, but beneath the skin the paint is still wet and malleable and will fall if given the chance. It's clear that Doran doesn't fight or attempt to disguise the effects of gravity, he just accepts it as part of the process.
More and more, in these new paintings, he is exploring the physical nature and limits of the way he works. He squeezes coils of pigment from the tube and lets it lie. He gathers pigment that falls off and reintegrates it into the painting in kaleidoscopic globules. He tears the outer layer of skin to reveal glimpses of other chromatic worlds beneath.
In a key work exhibited late last year, though not in the current show, tellingly entitled Surgery, he transplants an entire area of skin. Bright Smile picks up on an incidental effect - smiling lips - but doesn't indicate a representational subject matter. While his work is abstract in the sense of being non-representational, it is cheerfully, conversationally engaged with the world: the notion of talking and conversation turns up again and again in his titles.
The paintings could reasonably be interpreted as metaphors for bodies or stellar systems. He is engagingly willing to push things to the limit and beyond. Fiercely concentrated and self-critical, he never gets complacent or settles for easy effects. His work is accessible but also demanding and complex. More than anything, it's worth seeing for yourself.
Although he has been painting for a long time, Joseph O'Connor has exhibited only sporadically, most notably with the Independent Artists. Several of his virtues - his humanist, sensitive, painterly approach - reflect vital aspects of their ethos. His current show offers a rare chance to see a substantial body of his work. He is best known for his paintings of footballers and other sportsmen, and these predominate, augmented by some fine studies from old masters.
The meeting of art and sport, particularly, say, equestrian sports, tends to produce competent but bland representational genre work. O'Connor does not go in this direction at all. Like Basil Blackshaw, at his best he produces thoughtful, enigmatic images of heroic, vulnerable figures, images that have a universal, mythic quality. Some of his head studies, particularly, recall Elizabeth Frink's sculptures of warriors, and O'Connor has a sculptural feeling for form, beautifully elucidated with his broken, understated, provisional line.
The clashes on the football field he depicts are charged, heroic endeavours in which the heady potential of victory is always shadowed by the possibility of defeat. It's the awareness of this that lends his protagonists a tragic gravitas. O'Connor consistently favours tentative, multiple views and is wary of a conspicuous, polished finish, but there is tremendous skill invested in the casual look of his work.
Donald Teskey's Not Only Forms consists of relatively small landscape paintings made during a stay at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in north Co Mayo. Although there are a few of the streetscapes with which he is commonly associated, the residency drew him out of the town to paint the huge, dramatic Atlantic shoreline. Hence most of the images lack the scaffolding of right angles and diagonals that usually structures the patterns of light and space in his work, but they find something interesting to take its place.
They find an observant engagement with the climate that colours the relentless attack of the sea on the coast. Teskey has produced a series of subtle, atmospheric accounts of water and rock, including a set of waves breaking that authentically get that sense of cold, drenching, power in tonal studies made with spare, gestural marks. Elsewhere, equally effective, longer views of the shoreline recall Mary Lohan's paintings of the north-west.
