Visual ArtsUntil 1989, the Berlin Wall was the physical embodiment of the ideological fault-line between Europe East and West. Today Berlin is exceptionally expressive of another fault-line, between past and present: the past is everywhere in the city, and so too is the future, in the form of development on a vast scale, and the balance between the two remains uneasy and problematic, something that, arguably, lends the place an air of edgy possibility.
All of which make it an appropriate venue for an exhibition of Hughie O'Donoghue's outstanding new series of paintings, Last Poems. They are on view there in the Galerie Michael Jenssen Berlin until December 22nd.
Our relationship to our own history is one of O'Donoghue's enduring thematic preoccupations. Implicit in much of his work is the idea that we have a moral duty to remember, that to relinquish the past is to lose a sense of who we are and what we might become, to forget what we owe to the future as well as the past.
He has broached these concerns in several bodies of work that treat variously the Passion, his father's wartime experiences as a soldier in several theatres of operations during the second World War, and the lives of his mother's antecedents in the hard, impoverished country of northwest Mayo. It is apparent that personal history is inextricably related to public history.
As it happens, there is an additional retrospective quality to the work in Last Poems, as though O'Donoghue is engaging in a personal reprise of things that have engaged him over the past 15 or so years, while also looking forward to other potential avenues of exploration. There is a brooding, elegiac quality to many of the dozen-plus paintings, though it must be said that their melancholia never comes across as being unduly negative. On the contrary, the business of contemplation and reflection is generative and creative.
The show takes its title from a book of poems by George Meredith in 1909. In the muted half-light of the painting, we see a heap of beets piled up in a wet-looking field while a dog mooches around in the background. The beets bear a disturbing resemblance to a heap of human skulls, and the inclusion of a copy of Meredith's book, its title page legible, suggests that the ambiguous image is a premonition of the horrors to come in the 20th century. O'Donoghue sees the epochal conflicts of the first and second World Wars as marking a decisive loss of innocence in our collective consciousness, and as shaping our imaginative world.
The notion of art as a kind of imaginative archaeology has been central to his work from early on. As with several other poets and painters, he was much taken with Danish archaeologist PV Glob's book about the recovery of human bodies, preserved to a remarkable degree, from the bogs of Jutland. Immersion in the peat had an effect like tannic acid on the human skin, so that the figures look as if they were composed of the same material as the earth itself.
This is striking for a painter, and O'Donoghue's painted figures look not only as if they have been physically excavated from the medium that surrounds them but also are as one with it. When he began to use large-scale photographs, he and Anthony Hobbs devised a way of printing photographic images so that they too have a skin-like quality, and can be physically integrated into the picture surface.
It's an important point, because it means that the images are not collaged onto the surface but are part of the surface, something that is immediately evident when you see the paintings themselves.
Making a painting is always a partly reconstitutive project for O'Donoghue, and it is as if this is underlined in the Last Poems works by the way most of them are physical constructions, incorporating multiple individual elements. They have a rough-hewn, constructed character, featuring inset wooden panels, for example, that suggest openings such as doors or windows (apertures onto inner worlds, perhaps), as well as, metaphorically, the energy entailed in holding together the mass of disparate things, material and immaterial, that make up each painting.
Sleeping and dreaming figures recur in the Last Poems pictures. At least one of them, A Stone Staircase, is an extraordinary, iconic image, partly perhaps because of its unsettling ambiguity. We see the figure of a young woman stretched out on a stone staircase. The staircase, and most of her body save her head, are submerged. While the setting is spare, the water clear and glassy, the figure inevitably recalls Millais's celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia.
She shares something with most of the figures in the exhibition, in that we do not know whether she is a contented dreamer or a victim.
The ambiguity is certainly intentional. Each of the paintings opens up a space of imaginative possibility, but each is also tinged with an awareness of tragedy and loss. The German translator Matthias Wolf, when he saw the image of the sleeping youth in Fool's House, said that he was immediately reminded of Rimbaud's chilling poem The Sleeper in the Valley. Having established a scene of bucolic serenity inhabited by a young man, smiling in sleep, the poem concludes: "He sleeps in the sunlight, one hand on his chest/ Tranquil. In his right side, there are two red holes."
Last Poems, Paintings by Hughie O'Donoghue, is at Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin, Kockstrasse 60, D-10969 Berlin until Dec 22. www.galeriemichaeljanssen.de
