VISUAL ARTS/Aidan Dunne: In Margaret Corcoran's An Enquiry, we look at pictures of a girl looking at pictures. The show consists of a coherent group of images in which the girl, dressed in a thick white coat, makes her way around the green-painted Milltown Room of the National Gallery. Corcoran is known for critically reworking images from art history, and that is what she does here, with tremendous zip, concentration and authority. She also has a penchant for multiple levels of reference and meaning.
The show's title alludes to Burke's essay on the Sublime, which in no small measure shaped the progress of romantic landscape painting. These pictorial ideas are evident in some of the works that make up the Milltown Bequest. But Corcoran filters her expert recreations of these works through another mode of perception, the cool realism of Degas.
By accident or design, the gallery's background green is an appropriately Degas-like colour. We get a sense of one way of seeing regarding another way of seeing, and the implication that our own way of seeing will at some point be similarly framed. But all this is delivered in a thoroughly engaging, thoroughly visual way, without didacticism or dogmatism. A gem of a show.
Via is a curatorial artists' group, made up of Sally Timmons, Sarah O'Toole and Susan Gogan. Via Camden St is an ambitious curatorial venture involving more than 30 artists, whose work is dispersed throughout some 25 venues on or adjacent to Camden Street in Dublin. In some cases, this means a more or less conventional display of work in a gallery or gallery-like setting, but most of the time the art is woven seamlessly, or fairly seamlessly, into the fabric of the street, which is the heart of a richly textured area that has gained a renewed, diverse vitality in recent years.
This is a terrific idea and it works well, but one consequence is that the best way to encounter most of the individual pieces is by chance, as you go about your business.
Trying methodically to track them all down, even with the help of the freely available (if rudimentary) map and guide, is time-consuming and frustrating, either because they are just hard to find or because some piece of technology isn't working at that moment. So the main point of the exercise would seem to be that people will happen on a piece and then, perhaps out of curiosity, pursue others. It is a worthy aim: art in the for the community. Incidentally, the placement throughout is thoughtful and pertinent.
There are two kinds of paintings in Janet Pierce's Taylor Gallery show. In one, the smaller watercolours, washes of colour evoke the ridges of a vast mountain range, receding endlessly into the distance, suffused with a misty radiance. Mountain landscapes also appear in the other strand of work, which is on a larger scale, with textural surfaces built up by the application of paper collage. These paintings are spatially more diverse and ambiguous, sometimes suggesting windows, sometimes narrow vertical forms. Again the light is diffused, aglow.
While the titles refer to specific locations, including the Siera Cabreres Mountains in southern Spain as well as Pierce's more familiar terrain in Co Donegal and Scotland, the paintings do not come across as being about specific places as much as, in a more general way, about an intense experience of landscape. The words "spiritual" and "affirmative" inevitably come to mind, and it has to be said that, at times, in the smaller watercolours, Pierce's work is in danger of being too easily affirmative, in that she doesn't push beyond her undoubted facility with picture-making. She can and does make beautiful images, but her work becomes grittier and more interesting when she finds herself in less accustomed terrain, when the spaces she offers us are not so immediately comforting. Here, this happens in the larger work, in which she seems to be feeling her way towards different kinds of spaces, where there is more doubt, but also more life.
ONE OF the most striking pieces in Project's recent Drawing on Space show was Oliver Zwink's recreation of a dilapidated city corner, effected with just coloured ink and paper. Now Zwink has an installation, Square, at Dublin's newest, and probably smallest, gallery space, the Goethe Institut's Return to Art. In what previously served as a receptionist's office, Zwink, working again with ink and paper, has made a scaled-down metropolis.
However, what at first looks like an orderly city is on closer inspection revealed to be ramshackle and messy, dystopian rather than utopian. While the gallery space is certainly limited, it is a welcome addition to the Institut and, as with Zwink's piece, could well serve as a useful adjunct to an exhibition elsewhere. The intention is to provide a showcase for young German and Irish artists.
At the Original Print Gallery, Black Church Studio artists have come up with responses to the word Metamorphosis, at the suggestion of Jan de Fouw, within a uniform 30cm x 30cm format. Generally, they respond in an oblique, under-stated way as far as the theme goes, though the work itself is consistently good.
It breaks down into two broad areas of concern, figure and landscape, though in a variety of ways. Margaret McLoughlin, Catherine Kelly, Janine Davidson, Alison Pilkington and Michael Timmins stand out, as does Cora Cummins, whose recent solo show at Kevin Kavanagh was, as it happens, entirely devoted to the theme of metamorphosis in landscape.
Breon O'Casey's paintings and sculpture at the Peppercanister in Dublin make for an enormously enjoyable exhibition. His rhythmic, pared-down, abstracted compositions are notable for their judicious though bold use of colour. He likes to set a cluster of earth hues alight with a vivid blast of red or yellow.
His stylised bronzes, while they stick to a figurative language, have the same quality of stubbornness about them as the paintings, and combine a refined design sense with a willingness to just go for the image in the most direct, unaffected manner possible.
