VISUAL ART:THE ANNUAL GROUP exhibition that dominates the visual arts strand of the Boyle Arts Festival is a remarkable phenomenon. For one thing, it is stubbornly itself.
That is to say, it hasn't been coaxed or coerced into conforming to an arts festival template, which is both a credit to the Arts Council's judgment and proof of the exceptional stubbornness and persuasiveness of one individual.
For the exhibition as it exists is largely the creation of the festival's current chairman, Fergus Ahern, whose accountancy firm is based in the town and whose passion for contemporary Irish art led him to expand his role in relation to it from collector to curator and, by all accounts, publicist and salesman. Not incidentally, he has been a moving force in building the Boyle Civic Art Collection which, as a growing municipal collection, puts many larger Irish towns and cities to shame.
Like its predecessors, the 19th Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Art is a big, rumbustious jamboree in which myriad pictures are stacked two and three high on the walls of King House. Don't look for niceties of installation along fashionably minimal lines. Instead, leap into the overwhelming torrent of paintings and sculptures and enjoy being swept along. Like the RHA annual exhibition, the point is inclusiveness, and that extends to the audience. It's clear that over the years the exhibition has built up a considerable audience and that local people don't feel in the slightest bit hesitant about looking at contemporary art and forming their own opinions about it. What might be surprising is the way that taste has developed over time.
In a sense, the exhibition conforms to the conservative stereotype of an elitist event organised and controlled by a few individuals, at a time when the democratisation of art is a priority.
It is partly true, as well, that the content of the exhibition is relatively conservative, favouring traditional media, formats and subject matter. You don't get much in the way of direct social and cultural interventions, for example, and you can be fairly certain you'll find a preponderance of oil paintings and cast bronze sculptures. Yet to describe it as conservative is to miss the point and is in any case only partly true because, particularly in recent years, the selection has become increasingly open to showing challenging work by younger artists.
Significantly, the impetus for the exhibition is local, and it has developed, with the occasional nudge and, within a local context.
It never opted for the route taken by the Claremorris Open Exhibition, for example, which for many years had a similar populist quality, yet reinvented itself at a certain point, moving away from the idea of a central exhibition venue to a number of site-specific interventions and placements throughout the town: an approach that certainly has its merits, yet entailed the loss of something of real cultural value in the event as it had been.
The Boyle exhibition hasn't been taken away from the people who instigated it in the cause of some notional democratisation. And in that regard, its apparent elitism, or what might be construed as elitism, has proved to be more democratic than the imposition of a theoretical democracy. It is very well attended, attracting criticism, approval - and purchasers. Boyle has established a reputation as a venue for small-scale sculptures, which make up a sizeable proportion of the whole. The overall list of exhibitors is implausibly long and encompasses such long-established favourites as Basil Blackshaw (as with many artists showing new work) and Seán McSweeney as well as more recent arrivals including Sinéad Ni Mhaonaigh and Robert Armstrong.
Because the show is inclusive in spirit, not everything is likely to appeal to any particular visitor, but you are guaranteed to find something that surprises and interests you. In no particular order, some pieces that were immediately striking: Barrie Cooke's excellent Sea, a painting as distilled and intense as its simple title; spare, textural landscapes by Mary Donnelly and Hilary Elmes; playful piece by Mike Fitzharris; beautifully judged little still life abstracts by KK Godsee; Graham Gingles' allegorical wooded landscape; Una Sealy's N orthside Swimis a really fresh, atmospheric study of a figure in an urban landscape setting; a fine bronze figure, Kate, by Elizabeth Le Jeune, and there's a real edge to Eoin MacLochlainn's two Awakeningpaintings, each a close-up of a human head.
Photography has been making tentative inroads and Eoin O'Conaill's works exploring the relationship between people and the Irish landscape are excellent. Other highlights include works by Sheila Rennick, Colin Harrison, Jonathan Hunter, Paddy McCann, Dorothy Smith, Philippa Sutherland, Jennifer Trouton, Keith Wilson and Clement McAleer.
LEONARD SEXTON'S Broken Halosat the OPW on St Stephen's Green (under the auspices of the Blue Leaf Gallery) addresses the question of large-scale figure painting in the aftermath of modernism. He takes an archetypal grouping woman, man, child - and plays a number of variations on it. Typically one or more figures are depicted not so much against as embedded in a blue background. Rather than reconstructing the architecture of the figures, as is the case with cubism, or distorting it, as happens with expressionism, Sexton usually lays down a straightforward representational image and works over it with choppy, gestural movements, scraping pigment across the surface.
This procedure recalls the work of Cecily Browne, whose frenetic, often explicitly sexual compositions are bravura displays of painterly virtuosity. By comparison, Sexton's pictures seem woefully under-powered and uninventive. His off-the-peg colour schemes suggest that he hasn't really developed a personal palette by attaining a good working relationship with a range of colour and tones. A lot of the mark-making seems random and undirected. Despite all the agitation, the paintings do not have a feeling of having been worked through. All of their energy is used up just in covering the surface. He is clearly a painter with abilities, but they have not been stretched or challenged here and the result is a superficial body of work.
In a round-up of exhibitions at the Galway Arts Festival, I somehow managed to substitute Stalin for Lenin in referring to Rainer Ganahl's exhibition Dadalenin. Apologies to the artist, whose show is part of an ongoing project which proposes that Lenin was a founder of Dadaism.
Whatever the likelihood of Lenin being a Dadaist, Stalin clearly wasn't: he was much more of a Socialist Realist.
Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Art, King House, Boyle, until Mon. Broken Haloes, paintings by Leonard Sexton, OPW, St Stephen's Green, until Fri.
