Melanie le Brocquy is not as well known as her brother, the painter Louis. Her output as a sculptor is relatively small, in both numbers and scale, and she seems a retiring rather than an ambitious person, but her work is widely respected in the artistic community. Certainly it more than merits the retrospective currently running at the RHA Gallagher Gallery.
She was born in Dublin in 1919, and attended the NCAD, going on to study in Geneva and at the RHA back in Dublin before marrying in 1944. In a pattern familiar from the lives of many women artists, marriage usually means children and a curtailment of artistic activity. This is true of Melanie as well. For the best part of 20 years she was absent from the art scene, and her first attempts to rejoin it, in the early 1960s, were hurtfully rebuffed when her work was rejected by exhibitions like the Living Art.
You can see why it was turned down, though. Her sculpture is subtle and understated; it comes out of an old tradition and is forthrightly domestic in scale and concerns - all quite against the grain of Irish art in the 1960s. Yet it also exceeds that description. From early on she seems to have had an instinct for spare, classical form quite outside the academic tradition, and an abhorrence of any kind of excess or decoration. Her affiliations are more with sculptors like Moore, Giacometti, Marini and Manzu.
It is striking that her figures seem to have inner lives, something conveyed not only by the props that engage their attention but because she captures a quality of inwardness that lends them a certain existential loneliness - it is this, rather than specific visual resemblance, that brings Giacometti to mind in relation to her work. The bearing of her mostly female figures also suggests a certain stoicism.
Mind you, it's a little unfair to mention props, because usually more than props are involved. When she depicts a woman reading a novel, she invokes the process of reading, the idea of an inner world, and her family pairs and groups are never simply sunny embodiments of the nuclear family unit - there is always an awkwardness and introspection to the way the figures relate that has to do with a precise observation of body language. It's noteworthy that she is extremely precise in her titles, always specifying the relationship of one figure to another, or what exactly the figures are doing.
This is because while her figure studies are characterised by detailed observation, it is not observation in the academic sense of the exhaustive study of anatomical structure. With le Brocquy, it's more a question of noticing small gestures, momentary movements and attitudes, like vivid details glimpsed in the corner of your eye. This is exemplified in the fragmentary Man Stepping which concentrates on the implied motion purely in terms of hips and thighs.
Could Girl on a Nudist Beach be a sly dig at all those academic nudes? An example of practical rather than decorative nudity. It's a good piece, capturing a degree of awkwardness but also a physical boldness in the figure. Her portrait busts are better than most. There are outstanding portraits of Louis and her mother Sybil here. A big bust of Oscar Wilde is slightly more problematic, but it holds up reasonably well. Ultimately, the very modesty of her ambition has been her greatest strength. There is an honestly tentative quality to her figures that lends great conviction to the final results. She never promises what she cannot deliver.
In Nigel Rolfe's Dead Flowers, a slide-tape installation at Green on Red, you enter a darkened gallery space which resonates to the steady beat of a custom-made musical soundtrack. Voices rise and fall in atmospheric waves of sound, setting a sombre mood while cinema screen-sized images of dead, desiccated flowers are projected on the wall. At first you're aware that you are looking at plants, but soon the strange, contorted forms of the flowers, each blending into the next, become a language in themselves, infinitely varied, self-sufficient and expressive.
Cut flowers are all about brief, brilliant display: then they are summarily discarded. In a way it's an inevitably funereal set-up, and a quality of elegy and lament is intended, but it's not entirely glum. Rolfe doesn't simply use the decaying plants as a convenient metaphor; he clearly became engrossed in looking at them as physical forms, in choreographing their elaborate dance of life in death. As a result, the cumulative impact of sound and images stay, with you and engender, a surprisingly rich network of associations.
Patrick Conyngham also uses sound - an agreeable, Eastern chant - as a background for his paintings and poems in Deep Cur- rents at the Origin Gallery. The emphasis in his work is on self-discovery, with strong mystical overtones. His show suffers from the fact that he seems undecided whether his priority is art or therapy. About half of the work makes the leap from self-expression, with all the self-indulgence the term implies, to something of a different order entirely - selfless expression, perhaps. The difference is an acceptance that pictures are not merely feel-good exercises, that they can fail. Furthermore, that is the point at which the process becomes really interesting, the point where your actions determine success or failure.
Conyngham clearly has this capacity. He uses thick paint and bold colours, sometimes quite strikingly and to excellent effect. Heart, Jewel, Deep in the Woods, The Flow . . . , A Gentle Surprise, Deep Currents and several other paintings achieve something cogent, interesting and distinctive in pictorial terms. Yet elsewhere he doesn't seem to bother. I would argue that he needs to work harder at meeting the demands of the painting, and let the message take care of itself, because there really is something there worth working for.
Francis Tansey, at the Grosvenor Gallery, makes hard-edged geometric abstracts that exhibit a kinship with op art. One of his pictures pays homage to Victor Vasarely while implying that he has something more in mind, and perhaps he does. There is a darkness to Tansey's work that is quite distinctive, partly because he uses heavy black shadows a great deal, to create the illusion of layered and recessive spaces that produce much of the visual interest in his compositions. And who knows? Maybe Golden Circle No 1, is partly intended as a barbed social comment. But generally the sharp, hard, surfaces of the work seem armoured against our gaze, evoking a smooth, synthetic, virtual and slightly ominous world.
Melanie le Brocquy is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery until August 29th; Nigel Rolfe's Dead Flowers is at Green on Red until July 31st; Patrick Conyngham is at the Origin Gallery; Francis Tansey is at the Grosvenor Room Gallery, the Ormond Hotel, until July 30th
