Stacking and layering have replaced folding in the work of the highly regarded but stubbornly independent abstract painter Ciarán Lennon, but the tension remains between what can and cannot be seen, writes Aidan Dunne
CIARÁN LENNON HAS played a significant role in the Irish artistic scene since the early 1970s, yet he also remains somehow apart from the mainstream, a singular, at times slightly truculent presence, stubbornly independent. He takes a long view of his own work in terms of both time and geography, measuring himself against historical tradition and current practice in a global rather than a national context. While he has shown widely and is highly regarded professionally, it could be argued that, artistically, he doesn’t occupy a position commensurate with his record and achievements.
As exhibitions at major public and commercial galleries have demonstrated, he is capable of working convincingly on a large scale and equally adept at investing small-scale works with substantial gravitas. Technically, he’s always been extremely competent, even at a time when many artists were far too blasé about technique. Yet his work hasn’t been exhibited as much as it might have been, so the RHA’s current show, Invisible Weight, Untouchable Colour, is exceptional in offering a chance to see a substantial survey of his more recent paintings and related work.
Born in Dublin in 1947, Lennon has written that he ran away from home for a spell during his teens and seemed for a time destined to become a soldier in the British army, before returning and eventually going on to study at the National College of Art and Design. He also trained as a camera operator at RTÉ. In the note accompanying the RHA exhibition, his artistic approach is succinctly described thus: “Lennon’s work is a particular hybrid of American Minimalism, with its insistence on the materiality of the painted object, and European Arte Povera, which licensed the associative quality of materials.”
He has cited Francis Bacon and Frank Stella as influences in different ways. Bacon’s work effectively concluded the possibilities of figuration for him (despite his facility for representational painting), and Stella expunged hierarchical compositional structure.
He has also noted the way that colour has a startling, autonomous presence in Poussin’s rigorously ordered compositions, something that presumably prompted him into a liberated view of colour as something not necessarily attached to objects and hence untouchable.
If, at first glance, his work often comes across as being uncompromisingly abstract in its concerns, he has consistently been at pains to emphasise those humanising associative qualities. He frequently appeals to the formative role of childhood experiences, for example, in shaping what we see in his paintings – or what remains unseen. The experiences, though, generally have to do with the quirks and oddities of perception itself rather than with, say, moments of particular emotional awareness or insight, and there remains something distinctly guarded and self-contained about his work.
“As a child,” he has written, “I was fascinated by the fact that I could see everybody else but could never be seen by myself. I sense somehow that in some odd way I was only ever seeing myself.”
Hence his enduring emphasis on seeing and on not seeing, typified in the implied, contained spaces of his many “folded” pieces. Or, again, there was his mother’s rather clever trick of allowing him to paint the back of the house, so long as he used water, an experience rehearsed in the Lookmaquickbeforeitdries pieces in the exhibition.
THE VARIOUS PHASES of his work have often been accompanied by particular nomenclatures. In 1989 he used the chess term Zugzwang – whereby one is compelled to make a move to one’s own disadvantage – for a series of folded drawings. The monumental Scotoma paintings, in 1994, refer to an ellipse or blind spot in the visual field.
Incidentally, Lennon also views Scotoma as consisting of a dialogue with the work of the great renaissance painter, Giotto. L’Entre, in 1995, evokes an in-between space or state, with the French word for “between”. Hapax, in 2002, is a hapax graphomenon rather than the more conventional linguistic usage, hapax legomenon, indicating a once-off word or occurrence of a word.
The Camac series derives from the Camac River flowing through Inchicore in Dublin.Again harking back to childhood, Lennon recalls, as a schoolboy, being greatly taken with daily views of the water afforded by a storm drain, effectively a tiny window, built into the stonework of the Emmet Road bridge over the river. The discarded dyes from a nearby papermill were fed into the river, and Lennon would register the changing palette each day. He identifies the tightly framed constant flux of light and colour visible through the tiny window, with its triangular lintel, as instrumental in shaping his vision as an artist.
Up to and including Scotoma, the dominant trope in his work is one of folding. Whether literally, in the form of folded and stacked fabric, or metaphorically, in the form of stark diagonal brushstrokes that obliterate what was previously there, the act of folding builds up an inventory of process as something implicit but no longer directly visible. The imposing scale and sheer physical presence of the Scotoma paintings are set against a feeling of uncertainty created by the sense that, entirely within the rules of Lennon’s methodology, a subsequent brushstroke might easily have changed what we are looking at. The visible surface is thus both monumental but also fleeting and provisional, an anxious, insecure space.
More recently, as in virtually all the work exhibited in the RHA exhibition, stacking and layering take over from folding per se. The Camac series is painted on copper, each individual piece built up in many layers. Of course, one overall colour dominates in each case, that of the last layer to be applied. But, again, there is an inventory of underlying colours glimpsed along the edges and in the form of the copious drips that accumulate at the base of the panels. The surfaces as well (and characteristically) seem fluid and tenuous.
His Arbitrary Colour Collection series of the last few years, painted on elegantly shaped copper and brass sheets which stand away from the wall, elaborate on the procedures of Camac. They suggest a process of deconstruction that is more enthusiastically embraced in the Lens works. These are unruly stacks of elements that might – only might, mind you – be the constituents of paintings. They are stacked suspended against the wall rather than on the floor, but they would make as much sense sited on the floor. The earliest examples of the Lens series kept to a rectangular format, but most of what we see in the RHA is pointedly irregular, each successive layer of material (wire mesh, transparent acrylic sheeting, blocks of plastic, aluminium) applied askew over the one beneath. A final layer of pigment restores the geometric order of vertical and horizontal, but only just about.
LENNON RELISHES THE varied heft and textures, the intractability or fluidity, of the many materials he uses, and this comes across in his handling of them. He likes the precise but seemingly offhand gesture. Each individual Lens freezes a moment when centrifugal forces threaten to pull the whole structure to bits. As ever, Lennon is drawn to what is barely, or precariously there. Underlying layers show through the semi-transparent acrylic pigment. Corners of acrylic or metal protrude. Nothing falls into line quietly.
Each work is a negotiation of a space that threatens to disappear before our eyes. That might sound almost dismissive – to make something that teeters at the edge of disintegration – but one imagines Lennon would be happy to achieve precisely that.
Ciarán Lennon: Invisible Weight, Untouchable Colouris at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2, until Feb 15, 01-6612558
