Visual Arts Aidan DunneReviewed: Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: Scattered Occasions, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until April 3rd (01-6708055) Martina Mullaney: Turn In, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, until April 11th (01-6714654) Pure Potential, Arthouse building, Dublin, until Sunday
Patrick Michael Fitzgerald is an Irish artist who studied in London and has been based for a number of years in Bilbao, in northern Spain. Within the past few years he has exhibited extensively in group and solo shows in Europe. He is an abstract painter, and there is an open, speculative, exploratory character to his work. As the paintings in Scattered Occasions make clear, he is a difficult artist to pin down in terms of personal stylistic identity.
The exhibition includes two distinct bodies of work, each significantly different from the other. More, although he could certainly be described as an abstract painter, Fitzgerald is no formalist pure and simple. He casually admits any number of references into his pictures, including, he notes in a brief statement, the architectural layout of his studio and the buildings outside. This is most clear in the Partidas, which play with scaffolds of diagonals and positive and negative spaces in a very mellow, laid-back way.
He is interested, he says, in "the tension between different kinds of structure and the tension between figure and ground". And these concerns are evident as well in the Partidas. The more interesting paintings, though, are the title work and its companions, several of which are titled Region. These beautifully coloured and textured compositions inventively use underlying structural boundaries and lines.
They also extend his earlier penchant for digging into the picture surface. Here he makes a series of circular incisions, excavating semicircular indents or drilling all the way through. Visually, the effect is to bounce the picture plane back and forth as we read the markings as being on one side or the other. It's as if the surface becomes an unstable, flexible, elastic membrane. There is a sense of following the line of an improvisation, of allowing chance to play a part - but not to the detriment of the work. Sophisticated in a good- humoured, no-fuss way, the pictures come together extremely well.
Martina Mullaney's photographs in Turn In are studies of beds in night shelters and hostels. Each image is similarly, tightly framed. We see an expanse of wall and, along the bottom third or so of the picture, a section of bed. The austere simplicity evokes not so much reportage photography as painting, from the romanticism of Casper David Freidrich to the sublime abstractions of Mark Rothko. But inscribed into the formal structure of the images are vestigial traces of human presence.
The empty chair has long been a signifier of absence. And the sense of absence here is all the more affecting because of the sparseness, the blank anonymity of the settings. Mullaney subtly uses the aesthetic pictorial grammar of the cultural mainstream to point out what is missing from the picture, the marginalised and excluded. In this case people used to being looked at evade representation.
Another part of Mullaney's project was to invite residents of shelters and hostels to see rather than be seen. The photographs they made, edited and marshalled in a 90-piece grid, provide a composite portrait of the city that is edgy, vibrant and intimate. The show also includes a series of eloquent images from another series by Mullaney, Dinner For One, documenting the decline of the evening meal in favour of solo, improvised snacking. This time the painterly reference is to the tradition of still life and interiors. No people again, just the traces of their presence: plates of half-finished food, books, Star Trek on the television. There's a student-like feeling to most of the settings, many of which seem temporary and forlorn. This is, in all, an extremely good show.
Pure Potential is a showcase for emerging artists. Sponsored by Smirnoff, it occupies the erstwhile Arthouse building on Curved Street, in Temple Bar. The theme is, simply, urban. The curators are Mark St John Ellis and Nicholas Gore Grimes. There are 11 participating artists, and their work generally suits the jagged, angular, uneasy spaces of the building.
Thematically the show works very well, from the burning car and heavy thumping bass of Urban Collaboration by Authorless in the basement to Beth O'Halloran's meditative installation on the anonymity and transience of urban life, Lost. The best part of her work is a visual inventory of lost property arranged in a grid, each item tagged and invested with its own unspoken history.
Gavin O'Curry's deadpan paintings of car parks and Stephen Farrell's large-scale colour photographs are both examples of objective documentation. Pauline Rowan's staged photographs in her Showroom series feature a glimpsed, transient occupant camping in pristine domestic settings. There is presumably a point about homelessness, but there is more going on in the images as well. John Kelly's work suggests bureaucratic mechanisms of identification and control. Rhona Byrne's Urban Cowboy shows people colonising a communal space, altogether appropriately but also with a slight, heady edge of anarchy. It's not dissimilar in feeling to Seamus Harahan's Holylands, at Project, although it is visually inventive.
There is a dry, teasing quality to Christel Chaudet's Portrait Of A Woman As Venus, in which the subject seems listless and impatient with her iconic status. Martin Cregg's playful, offbeat photographs insert an expanse of inviting water into workaday urban spaces. It's well worth checking out.
