Visual Arts: David Quinn's Stations at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery consists of a suite of spare compositions, each focused on one or, less frequently, two figures. In two pictures the human figure is replaced by a tree, but the underlying feeling is much the same.
Reviewed
Stations, David Quinn, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until June 11, tel:01 8740064
Tony Treacy: A Retrospective, OPW, St Stephen's Green
Paul Ringrose and Killian Schurmann, Dalkey Arts, 19 Railway Rd, Dalkey until June 4, tel: 01-2849663
This isn't to say that Quinn paints wooden figures. In a way he paints everything as though it were wood: a world remade as an approximate, blocked-out model of itself, forms skimpy on detail and modelled by the warm, enfolding light of early morning or evening.
Hedges, trees and houses become monolithic blocks against slabs of hillside. The figures or, more often than not figure, given that one female figure is a recurrent presence, is usually fixed, static, meditative. The term meditative applies well to the atmosphere of the work as a whole. Quinn's overall title Stations allows several interpretations, none of them exclusive given the ambiguity of the imagery.
One thinks of the stations of the cross, or, as Yvonne Scott notes in her catalogue essay, railways stations, or the rural catholic practice of celebrating mass in parishioners' homes. There is, in relation to the latter, a sense of sanctified space in the way the deliberately stylised, simplified images are shot through with a glowing, radiant sunlight. The almond tree in one piece is a flame-shaped column of light against a dark background mass: epiphany, revelation, faith? A couple cling together in Believers, seem to believe mostly in each other. Pilgrims skirt a lake heading towards the conical summit of Croagh Patrick. Yet, as Scott notes, there is a distinct division between the hallowed domestic space and the world beyond. The woman in Nostalgia seems to look back to a prior time, beyond choices taken, the open gate. In Shephardess she guides, and in Resistance she guards the home. It is to Quinn's credit that his work can bear varied layers of meaning without losing its mellow gravitas.
Last week a small retrospective devoted to the work of Tony Treacy, who died last year, occupied the Atrium Gallery at the OPW on St Stephen's Green. It was a good tribute and it revealed an artist of great sensitivity and forceful insight, a self-critical talent edgily determined not to do the easy or obvious thing.
Treacy was born in 1968 and studied painting at the College of Marketing and Design in Dublin and later at the University of Ulster in Belfast. Apart from pursuing his own work, he taught part-time and, from 1999, was a clerical officer with the OPW.
It seems fair to assume that he was at some stage a student of Patrick Graham in Dublin. Graham opened the exhibition and his influence is evident in Treacy's work, which nevertheless has a strongly individual character. He shares Graham's respect for drawing, his trust in what might be termed emotional instinct and his wariness of facility. The textural distinction between his drawings and paintings is immediately striking.
Many of the drawings are meticulous tonal studies, precise, fine-grained images built up incrementally. In some cases their smooth, seamless surfaces are cut by odd, unsettling disjunctures and elisions. They refer to photographs, including a childhood snapshot, and art historical sources. Generally the paintings are more roughly textured, built up through a process of attrition, hard-won. As a note in the catalogue observes, this pattern of "scraping away and rebuilding" complements but never contradicts the more additive, considered nature of the drawings.
The paintings on view are also small in scale, and have a conversational intimacy about them. He worked consistently, even obsessively, in terms of variations on a relatively small number of themes including, particularly, self-portraiture and memento mori still life subjects.
In both of these areas he came up with some exceptional pieces. A concern with making a stage-like space also comes across strongly in these and other paintings, including the buildings in his series of city studies: a theatre of the imagination. It is a pity to encounter work that has so much to offer in this way as a posthumous retrospective.
Dalkey Arts is currently showing a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Paul Ringrose and glass panel sculptures by Killian Schurmann. The former is one of a number of very capable realist painters who make descriptive works based on landscape.
As with Helen Richmond's recent, outstanding work in Hedge School at the Hallward Gallery, Ringrose focuses on matter-of-fact, prosaic details.
He doesn't romanticise his subject matter, and he doesn't make picturesque compositions. At the same time, he doesn't dwell on ugliness and dereliction in the landscape, or explore the reality of Irish rural life as does Martin Gale.
He does offer one view that nods towards Gale with its well worn farm machinery set in the midst of the rugged landscape that weathers and wears it down. But by and large there is a more celebratory quality to his rapt images of sections of vegetation in enveloping close-up, as with studies of dandelion and cranes bill, or in longer views of trees and, in the biggest work in the show, the sun-warmed, eroded rock of a stubborn sea stack.
Ringrose's meticulous accounts of what he sees brings to mind Goethe's appeal to trust our eyes: "Do not try to get behind the phenomena. They themselves are the doctrine."
Schurmann is known as a singular virtuoso of glass. Having trained as a glass blower in Germany, he gradually devised a distinctive means of making ambitious panel compositions that allow him to exploit the subtle interplay of textured light, colour and linear form.
With their incredibly fine detail and sense of space, his pieces have the effect of conjuring up miniature worlds. There is also a feeling of time caught on the hoof in the way cascades of colour and texture are fixed in the substance of the transparent masses of glass.
