Visual Arts Aidan DunneThe central piece in Gary Coyle's South Side Gothic at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is a portentous reworking of Caspar David Friedrich's iconic masterpiece of Romanticism, The Wanderer Above the Mists, in which a well-dressed rambler gazes across an expansive landscape of mountain peaks protruding above rolling mist. It's an image that has been pressed into service in numerous contexts since.
Coyle's version, Tomorrow belongs to me, presents us with the ominous figure of a hooded man with his back to us, gazing not across an airy landscape but into the impenetrable tangle of a dense forest.
The domain of Coyle's protagonist is the underworld. The picture could be read as an allegory of contemporary Ireland, and specifically of the darkness underlying or accompanying prosperity.
But as well as Friedrich, it evokes Dante at the opening of the inferno, coming upon himself in a dark wood, having lost his way.
As with all but one of the works in the show, it is a charcoal drawing, and Coyle relishes the properties of the medium - the way, for example, it can be used to generate masses of incredibly thick, deep, powdery blackness, and the way, like paint, it is amorphous and malleable but can also be shaped and focused so that it becomes precise and linear. He likes putting us in the position of dealing with an overwhelming profusion of detail, a pattern so dense and uniform that we become disorientated, and then surprising us as we suddenly glimpse something that we've been looking at but not seeing.
What we haven't been seeing is usually something nasty, or perhaps someone to whom something nasty has been done. Coyle has been quite upfront about his morbid streak and his fascination with dark deeds, impulses that are both symbolic of, and closely related to, more overtly aesthetic concerns. That is, in looking at an image, we are always searching for something unseen, something more, and the something more might be something terrible, like the fact of mortality that we do our best to ignore.
There is a Gothic side to Coyle's imagination, so maybe it's surprising that he is only acknowledging it explicitly for the first time here. In any case, having mentioned it, he has clearly decided to go all the way. New career same town (After Redon) is luridly melodramatic in a positively theatrical vein. We see a face in the water, and it looks very like the artist's own face. It's notable that, previously, his images tended to leave out the implied protagonist, sometimes putting us, the spectators, into that role.
The most memorable images in this show - and there are several outstanding pieces - put the protagonist centre-stage, but facing away from us. And there is always a sense of being observed: who knows who might be gazing out from deep in the undergrowth? The protagonist is always the anonymous hoodie, a generic gangland figure, or someone like the killer in horror films or even Don't Look Now. We're looking at this figure who doesn't see us, but we, and he, may be under observation from within the surrounding woodland. In Eyes in the forest, this possibility is realised as the pattern of vegetation is transformed into a mass of eyes, while bunches of cables snaking through the undergrowth reinforce the idea of surveillance.
It's relatively unusual to make ambitious work that takes the form of drawing and doesn't for a minute aspire to be anything else. Coyle's instinctive liking for black and white, and particularly for black, doesn't mean that there is any lack of colour in his work. Oddly enough, it's clear that the addition of colour would take away from rather than enhance the images.
AT THE CROSS Gallery, Claire Carpenter shows small tempera paintings. Although exceptionally colour-fast and durable (barring physical destruction), tempera painted onto a gesso ground has an incredibly delicate, nervy responsiveness. Every little waver and tremble of the artist's hand is preserved in the surface, and clearly Carpenter likes this quality of immediacy or, even, intimacy. Her work is tied to the scale of tiny hand movements and gestures so that, although the paintings are small, she treats the pictorial space as huge.
More, the space is curiously indeterminate and dreamlike, allowing disparities of time and location, and accommodating interwoven narratives. Perhaps a term such as narrative references is closer to the mark than narrative as such, though, because Carpenter is exceptionally oblique and her imagery is fragmentary and often cryptic. Her imaginative world is a realm of fantasy or magic realism, with anthropomorphic birds and animals playing storybook roles, for example. Lest that make it all sound very playful, there are also enduring notes of sadness and loss.
In fact, the idea of the secret, held close and mulled over, perhaps tinged with guilt and regret, is surely at the heart of what she is trying to convey in her work. It is as though recollections are summoned in her mind's eye, recalled from the shadows of memory but never quite articulated or made explicitly visible. They are always only flickeringly and tenuously present, always on the point of fading away. The results can be wonderfully suggestive and evocative, but at the same time the dynamic in this present body of work has her becoming even more determinedly inward-looking and elliptical, giving us less and less to work with, less for our eyes and our minds. She is an eloquent, fascinating painter and it would be a shame to see her disappear down a path of diminishing returns.
South Side Gothic - Gary Coyle. Kevin Kavanagh, Great Strand Street, Dublin Until Nov 24
Claire Carpenter - paintings. Cross Gallery, Francis Street, Dublin
Until Nov 27
