Visual Arts: The Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Art, King House, Boyle, concluded National Health, Dimitri Tsykalov, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, until Aug 7 071-9141405 Yeats & Synge: In the Congested Districts, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, until Sept 4 071-9141405, writes Aidan Dunne
Reviewed
The Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Art has become something of an institution. It has gone through several incarnations, one of the most interesting of which entailed nominating well-known artists to act as curators, inviting the participation of artists whose work they admired. Regardless of the details of selection procedures, however, the show has evolved to be a predictably eclectic cross-section of current art with, unusually, a sizeable quotient of sculpture.
Aesthetically it is broadly conservative by nature, favouring paint, canvas and bronze over video or installation - yet like the RHA annual show, for example, it is genuinely eclectic and not to be categorised as blandly conservative.
Photography has made inroads for one thing, and this year Con Kelleher shows a rather beautiful work, Monta Rose, which uses a window frame, a simple grid, as the basis for a subtly toned, richly atmospheric image. Also worth mentioning is a photographic triptych by Linda Ruttelynck which generates a real sense of movement.
It is good that artists do not take Boyle for granted, in that the general level of work on view is very high. Witness two fine paintings by Makiko Nakamura, including an extraordinarily vivid red piece; Veronica Bolay's explorations of charged or heightened spaces; Blaise Drummond's large-scale contemporary take on a subject from high Romanticism, Wreck of Hope, in which the ship is reconfigured as an airliner; TP Flanagan's study of Lough Erne; bold shoreline landscapes in different modes by Nick Miller and Neal Greig; lusciously textured paintings by Paddy McCann and David Crone.
A number of artists come up with something predictable but also exceptional. Margaret O'Hagan's abstract composition is exceptionally lively and fresh (and relates interestingly to Fiona Joyce's very capable screenprints). John Shinnors' Circus on the Island, a triptych featuring one large painting and two much smaller drawings, is frenetically busy and takes a little getting used to. As ever with his work, it starts to make sense after you've come back to it a few times. Sculptor Catherine Greene is represented by exceptionally ambitious figurative groups.
The work of many other artists must also rank among the highlights of a crowded show: Michael Ward, Mary Lohan, Carolyn Mulholland, Gwen O'Dowd, Mark Rode, John Brennan, Sioban Piercy, Eithne Jordan, John Keating, Bernadette Kiely, Martin Gale, Graham Gingles, Joe Hanly, Mary Donnelly, Rosaleen Davey, Michael Canning, Eamon Coleman, Barrie Cooke.
Dimitri Tsykalov is a Russian-born, Paris-based artist who last year participated in the Artists Work Programme at IMMA in Dublin. National Health, his exhibition at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo, concludes this Saturday. It is a terrific, substantial show, featuring two major installation pieces, a cluster of sculptures and a sizeable group of photographic-sculptural works. The latter feature ingenious carved and constructed images of human skulls and heads (plus a foot and a pair of breasts) composed of various vegetables, or fruits, or processed meats.
The images play on the traditional meaning of the still life as a reminder of the transience of life and the inevitability of death. As with the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, Tsykalov uses his tremendous technical virtuosity in a quick-witted, light-footed way, adroitly carving a skull out of a pineapple or cabbage, for example, presenting it to us so smoothly and convincingly that we have to look again to figure out exactly what we're looking at - to realise that it is actually a pineapple. There is a distinctly grisly quality to much of what he does, and his humour is on the bleak side.
Move on from the photographs and you enter the installations, Dental Surgery and Operating Theatre. These recreations of key sites of medical technology are exhaustively detailed and more than usually nightmarish. They are particularly nightmarish because, while carefully attentive to the minutiae of paraphernalia and procedures, Tsykalov has fashioned every single thing in wood. As with the skulls, he has used a mixture of construction and carving, evoking the glossy, machine-tooled, smooth-textured world of high technology in the distressingly inappropriate vernacular of rough-hewn wood. Everything is there, including computer screens and printouts.
The effect is peculiar and disturbing. It is as if it enacts a delusion: the error of mistaking the appearance of things for their essence, surface for substance. It's also a bit like finding fragments of a lost civilisation in the jungle. We can imagine ourselves as being subject to this cruel-looking regime of care, and then remember that we are in fact subject to it, that beneath the veneer of technology, flesh and blood remains the same.
As if to emphasise this, the show's final room features a group of bodily organs on a vastly enlarged scale, ingeniously fabricated from earth and wood, hanging from the ceiling. Memorable stuff.
The Model also features a small though fascinating show Yeats & Synge: In the Congested Districts, documenting Jack B Yeats and John Millington Synge's tour of the "Congested Districts" of Mayo and Connemara, the poorest parts of Ireland, for a series of illustrated articles in the Manchester Guardian in 1905. Emer McGarry, who curated the show, has gathered together a number of Yeats's original illustrations together with their printed versions, complete with Synge's articles, and several of Yeats's sketchbooks (often tiny little notebooks), which take the form of meticulous, brilliantly observed visual diaries.
The experience was to resonate in the subsequent work of both artist and writer, most immediately leading to their celebrated collaboration the following year on Synge's The Aran Islands. Yeats was a practised draughtsman, with substantial experience of working for illustrated papers in England, and he had an eye for iconic images. Though, as McGarry points out, Synge's sense of outrage at the political failure and neglect that left so many people in dire straits is not really reflected in Yeats' drawings. He is more interested in character and what might be termed local colour, in capturing a sense of place.
Several of his heroic Western archetypes can be glimpsed in concise form here. It is a gem of a show and it's backed up by a good display from the gallery's substantial collection of works by Yeats and his father, John Butler Yeats. Worth making the effort to see if you are anywhere near Sligo.
