In this extract from the book 'Representing Art in Ireland' well-known writers present essays championing some of Ireland's leading artists
IT'S UNUSUAL for a commercial gallery to publish a book on the scale and scope of Representing Art in Ireland, writes Aidan Dunne, but since its establishment in 1999, the Fenton Gallery in Cork has seen its remit as extending beyond the conventional role of a commercial gallery. In mounting thematic group exhibitions and drawing on a large number of outstanding artists from well beyond the county boundaries, gallery director Nuala Fenton has sought to enrich and enliven the contemporary arts environment in Cork.
This volume is a measure of her ambition and an extremely handsome survey of recent art in Ireland. It broaches the work of over 130 artists, all of whom have exhibited with the gallery, and includes a series of short, specially commissioned texts by more than 30 writers, including Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Colm Tóibín, on individual artists, paired with illustrations of their work.
COLM TÓIBÍN on LOUIS LE BROCQUY
Louis le Brocquy, who was born in Dublin in 1916, is Ireland's most distinguished living painter. He works with an exacting reticence, each mark he makes carefully weighed, both representational and suggestive. The images he produces seem immensely finished with a masterly sense of composition and design, but they also have a painterly edge to them which allows his work great mystery.
He paints as though he is searching for something, a hidden sense lurks powerfully within and behind his painted images, something tentative and pure. But he also works towards a representation of a thing - a group of people in his early work, a head or a part of a body in his later work - trusting the paint to go further than mere representation, to move towards embodying the object on its own terms.
His images are constructed slowly with precision and care. He isolates a figure and then allows it to float. In the heads he has painted - the best ones are of Beckett and Joyce and Yeats, but there are also wonderful other heads from the 1960s - there is an enriching gap between the way he works on the head or the face or the eyes, full of detailed strokes and tonal variety and a superbly skillful manipulation of paint, and the way in which the rest of the picture is washed in a sort of luminous glow.
He uses all the possibility which paint offers, allowing features to glisten and shine, to seem weighty and intense, and then suddenly become light and ready to fade. He knows how to make a very precise mark - he is a wonderful draughtsman - and then work on some part of the picture which is full of strange, abstract light. If he is a painter steeped in philosophy, concerned to explore and transcend the ground and nature of our being, then it is important to remember that he has adhered with great determination to the idea that this can be done using the medium of paint, by working with textures and tones, lines and brushwork, more completely and more mysteriously than anyone working with words. Part of this power comes from how he plays time off against eternity in his tones, letting the precise line, the pure representation, stand for what is fixed and the rest for what floats, making clear as he works that time is merely the mercy of eternity.
MEDB RUANE on JANET MULLARNEY
Janet Mullarney's sculptures and drawings emerge from a ground where the heat of tango dancing meets the restraint of a quadrille.
A sensuous beauty whispers promises of invitation and being provoked, through materials grafted as skins to hold together ideas about relationship, and about art.
The look of things beckons you in to curious, precisely crafted objects which take shape as apparently magical creatures - dogs, ravens, cows. Here, the creatures symbolise something otherwise absent from the dance, or unacknowledged: the beast within, the animal who may devour you, the nurturing, simple domestic who drip-drips milk on demand.
Hewn, carved, then paint-battered, some of these forms grow from traditional materials, such as wood and plaster, used by craftspeople and artists for hundreds of years. You see especially a fluent exchange with Romanesque and medieval Italian carving and their art historical prestige, letting culture and tradition from past times open into time present.
Here's the provocation, as Mullarney up-ends times past by speaking to the dogmas as well as the inheritance. The gifts of imagery, iconography and technical know-how create a tradition, like a family almost, in which you can position yourself as a person or an artist. They are rich, seductively reassuring, comforting because they are familiar.
Time past offers comfort and consensus, but who wants to stay there? As well as a sense of security, belonging has a cost. The struggle to speak from within those comforts yet go beyond them is the journey on which she embarks, playing with resin, paint, hand-blown glass, fabricating human figures to see how and where they stand.
Mullarneys early work on family caught similar tensions: how you can't change the family, tribe or nation into which youre born and how much time you can spend trying to accept that limit. It's about the challenge of the social network in which you find yourself versus the challenge of emerging as a person in your own right. Without the spatial relationships of great art and sculpture, little could be said. The start point would be chaos. Mullarney wonders about what may be represented and what may not. Her questions are about whether something that can't be said, seen or heard may be shown or indicated if materials and symbols collide in certain ways.
With such forces involved - that constraint which is so pressing - Mullarney's work is bound to be passionate. The quadrille sets the story, the tango drives the mood.
FIONA KEARNEY on CLARE LANGAN
All photographs arrest time to create a single moment of looking. Clare Langan's rich imagery seems to hold that moment in an epic encounter of time and space. Her films stretch out and slow down the gaze so that there is a sense that we are exploring the very essence of the world, the elemental forces of nature known to us that remain deeply foreign in their raw power.
The archetypal elements of earth, water, air and fire that pervade Langan's imagery point to ancient philosophy as well as the Romantic tradition in art. This reawakening of the sublime is difficult terrain to negotiate as the very idea suggests a point beyond description, and can all too quickly fall into bombastic narrative. Langan carefully avoids any explicit association with natural disaster, navigating us away from the spectacular and catastrophic to a more unsettling implication of the natural forces at play in any environment. Hers is a tremulous world, fractal and vast, profoundly alive in every aspect of being.
There are few artists today who so perceptively address this great philosophical theme of being, and it seems to me that Langan's work accomplishes this not only because of her ability to create an experience of the macrocosm of our world but also because of her sensitivity to the potent presence of each individual moment. Her photographic stills reveal the depth of vision in her film making, the concentrated perspective that underlies the sweeping beauty of the moving image. The characteristic intensity of these single frames draws the viewer further into the realm of Langans visual imagination, and so the suspension of the film sequence becomes a way for us to journey beyond the narrative time of the film into a meditation on pictorial time and the nature of being itself.
JOHN MONTAGUE on BARRIE COOKE
Barrie Cooke has been a friend for nearly fifty years, so I am beginning to understand him and his net or knot of interweaving obsessions: fish, water, woman. The first Cooke I met was a hermit of the Burren, living in the heart of that extraordinary stonescape, and worshipping the sheela-na-gig at Kilnaboy. Indeed, Cooke was among the first to suggest Clares hidden richness, to which he pays homage in works like Woman in the Burren(1964).
Then he moved to Kilkenny, and began to respond to that deep alluvial landscape. Panta rei or everything flows, an epigram of Heraclitus, splashes the walls of his studio, and at that time he was living on the edge of a frothing mill-race outside Thomastown, which you could slide down at forty miles an hour. A day spent with Cooke on the Nore haunts me with a vision of Mother Natures overflowing richness.
Cooke was calling me to help net a salmon when I saw a swan sailing down a branch of that great river while a waterhen ushered her brood across the swans path. The salmon leaped, Cooke cursed, and the valiant mother hen set off, a tiny feathery missile, to daunt the mighty bird! Those rhythms were glorious in their complexity and simplicity, like one of his own paintings.
Although he was born in England and has never lost his crisp English accent, Cooke knows Ireland in a remarkably intimate way. And now we have the Sligo Cooke, living in a nearly mythical landscape, site of the second battle of Moytura. Sligo is probably the most painted Irish county, celebrated by Jack Yeats and Patrick Collins, but Cookes Godbeams, planks of light falling on mountains, brings a new romantic glow that is nearly mystical in its luminous intensity, like the ardent paintings of Bellini.
Heureux avec la nature comme une femme, I wrote in my first essay on Cooke, echoing Rimbaud, but what if the woman is being ravished? Recently, Cooke has begun to register the way the forces of life are being threatened by human greed.
While the unspoiled landscapes of New Zealand have been an inspiration, the pollution of nearby Lough Arrow has kindled him with a fascinated horror. And I remember a day along the Nore, when diseased salmon were raising their scabrous heads from the water. Barrie Cooke is not a frantic ecologist, a Green Warrior, but a passionate observer; in his world, the lambent and lovely are threatened by the dreadful sheen of pollution and putrescence.
CATHERINE MARSHALL on JOHN BYRNE
John Byrne is the contemporary visual equivalent to the poet in ancient Irish society who used sharp wit to expose hypocrisy, mediocrity and pretentiousness. In his art practice Byrne examines issues from a comic perspective, reducing monuments of political, religious and cultural division to the ridiculous. His approach varies from performance to film to tableau re-enactment and he has used all of these very effectively to undermine prejudice and stereotype.
Byrne first came to public notice in 2000 when he created Border Interpretative Centre. The project, in which Byrne explored the effect of the border on Irish life, while at the same time aiming sharp barbs at the heritage industry's tendency to commercialise every aspect of culture, was shut down after a week but the political message it spelled out was far reaching.
This was followed three years later with Would You Die for Ireland?,a short film of random interviews with pedestrians on the streets of Dublin, Cork and Belfast, including the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, caught on a city-centre walkabout. The question alternately yielded moments of high seriousness and hilarity as immigrants, tourists and natives alike expanded their chests and proclaimed their death wishes or gazed in astonishment at the interviewer.
While much of Byrne's work relates very specifically to his experience of growing up during the Troubles, he has also looked beyond Ireland at some of the icons of art history as vehicles for his anti-classical satire. Dublin's Last Supper(2004) offers a re-enactment of Leonardo da Vinci's famous fresco in Milan, that subtly suggests that the Renaissance has finally come to Ireland in the form of café culture, while at the same time pointing to growing pluralism in Ireland, and the new religion of consumerism.
While comedy and satire are correctly seen as cerebral artforms in comparison to the more emotional appeal of tragedy, Byrne's tableaux carry a real sense of seriousness. However much the viewer might laugh at the posturing of Orangemen when shown on Byrne's catwalk in Belfast Fashion Weekor admire the wit of We were a south facing family, the tragic effects of political and social conditioning are all too visible. These works force the viewer out of the artworld's tasteful white cube and into a responsible evaluation of the real world beyond. For all his visual sophistication, Byrne's true antecedent in Irish culture is Jonathan Swift, the literary equivalent of his subversive approach.
• Representing Art in Ireland, The Fenton Gallery, Cork €65