FELIM Egan works from a converted garage at the end of his garden, although "converted garage" are probably not the best words to conjure an image of Egan's warm, clean, frosted glass walled studio. Shelves here are filled with books, correspondence, exhibition catalogues, records and CDs a chunky Power Macintosh with a modem sits on the desk beside the fax. This is a studio which clearly not only provides a workshop, but also the control room for somebody who see the business of being an artist as extending beyond making art.
The shape of this studio, which he has occupied for nearly two years, has played a significant role in the final form of the works now on show at IMMA. What Egan calls "the basic module of the show" is the largest canvas that can be fitted in the studio, while both paintings and sculptures have been made with reference to their current home at IMMA. For his long awaited show at the museum, Egan has combined his interest in sculpture with the paintings for which he is better known. The result is a series of installations in which forms familiar from his previous paintings seem to make the long promised leap to three dimensional life, as the artist himself makes a significant leap forward in his practice.
Egan was born in Strabane in 1952. He began his art training, at Ulster Polytechnic before moving on to study at London's Slade School of Art and taking the celebrated scholarship for artists to The British School at Rome at the end of the 1970s. He has a small build with dark hair and a quiet way of speaking and moving about. He is married to the artist Janet Pierce, with whom he shares a house in Sandymount, a short distance from the Strand.
Surprisingly, Egan chooses a position seated behind his desk for his interview. Ostensibly this allows him to field telephone calls, but it is irresistible to see another purpose, irresistible to imagine the painter seeing the floor plan of his studio as a large canvas on which he carefully and precisely locks the minimal pictorial elements into a spacious composition.
ONE way or the other, with the painter seated on one side of his office desk and the reporter on the other, it is easy to forget who is being interviewed, even if Egan speaks gently and slowly, with soft northern syllables. It would be impossible, one imagines, on looking at his work to overestimate the degree to which things in Egan's world are carefully premeditated.
"The identity of the work, its reality and multiplicity are reflected through its perplexities and sub realisations," the German artist, AR Penck wrote somewhat cryptically of Egan's work in the catalogue for the latter's Cologne exhibition last autumn. He added "no one can know its meanings unless they are taking part in it."
The comment may be almost as sheer and seamless as Egan's paintings, but there is a degree of truth in it. Penck points out that Egan's communication shows discipline of a rare order. His painted images and his sculptures seek attention in the most restrained manner possible. The quiet, protracted, conversations between repeated forms parallel sticks, pairs of circles, a sandy, unfocussed ground, groups of triangles are for those willing to watch carefully, over a long duration.
Speaking about his own work, Egan stays clear of the word meaning". Instead, his conversations work around the how of his work, rather than the why. He may talk about the recurrence of certain forms, but not his attraction to them. When questioned closely about his work, he discusses all the minor decisions that control the look of a piece, almost never offering an explanation of the work other than in purely formal terms.
At one point when describing the slender poles of his sculptures for the show he says "with these people" before quickly correcting himself with these pieces." While such lapses are rare, the slip does seem to identify the source of the surprising charm that often permeates his work. His oeurve may often be classified with that of other Irish artists working within an abstract formalist context, such as Mary Fitzgerald, John Aiken or Richard Gorman, but beneath the steady, meticulous fixing of his sparse forms, Egan's images maintain an unexpected drollness unique among the group.
As well as his IMMA exhibition, Egan has also recently been working on an outdoor sculptural project for Meeting house Square in Temple Bar. While he enjoyed the opportunity to work here, certain aspects of the area's development have troubled him.
HIS experience working on his sculptural project for Temple Bar has not been a particularly happy one. Given that it was an opportunity to involve artists, I was disappointed by the degree of financing. At the end of the day, there were an awful lot of meetings and hassle for a fairly small fee," he says. Given that the artists were receiving this fairly small fee, it seemed a huge waste of time videotaping and photographing meetings with artists . . . there were also lots of difficulties negotiating with the people who were supposed to be on the side of the artists."
From the existence of his studio Internet connection one might imagine that he would be very supportive of another Temple Bar project, the digital arts centre, Arthouse even if his own work does not indulge in overt references to, or uses of technology. Nevertheless, his involvement with projects such as Art house's Artifact database designed to provide interested parties with easy, on line access to information about Irish artists has been discouraging.
"I got a print out from them and I discovered that I was listed on the database as a puppet maker," says Egan. He quickly dispatched an e mail alerting Arthouse to the problem, but received no reply. When a second electronic message also received no reply, he decided to revert to more traditional methods of communication. At the time of this interview, Egan did not know if he was still represented as a puppet maker to all those researching his work. Accidentally describing his sculptures as people is one thing, one might imagine finding himself classified as a puppet maker is quite another.
There are other organisations which he feels could be doing more for Irish art and artists. According to Egan, The Douglas Hyde Gallery exhibits "a fairly ungenerous attitude to Irish art". He sees the gallery's programming as too dependent on the offerings of a limited number of foreign sources. "It hasn't been at all helpful for Irish artists going abroad," he says. "It has all been one way traffic."
When Egan organised his own exhibition in Cologne last year, he realised the extent to which Irish artists must struggle on their own when trying to develop their careers outside Ireland. As far as raising the international profile of Irish art, he sees the opening of IMMA as a much more significant event" than this year's festival of Irish art in France, L'Imaginaire Irlaidais. Nevertheless, he will be taking part in the event, but in a private, rather than a public gallery. For Egan this is the way things should be.
"I've always really worried about committee art invariably politics and mediocrity come to bear in those situations," he says. Irish art has never really worked abroad. I think it would be better served by choosing a few really good artists and getting their work out there. The best approach is to bring an awareness of art and then subsequently the realisation that these artists emanate from Ireland. There is a danger of mediocrity coming from a show of so called Irish art, if the emphasis is on being Irish."
