Although it is not presented as such, Hughie O'Donoghue's exhibition Ten Years, at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, can be viewed as a slice of indirect autobiography, writes Aidan Dunne
Roughly 10 years ago, as the artist notes, he began to think about moving to Ireland with his family, and duly did so. Many years before, his mother had emigrated from rural north Co Mayo to England, married and settled down. The show's subtitle is Painting, Memory and the Human Form 1992-2002. O'Donoghue's decision to live in Ireland coincided with an intense meditative exploration of his immediate family history. Most of the pictures pn show result from that process.
Among them is a series of paintings and drawing relating to the hard terrain inhabited by his mother's family around Erris, but it is fair to say that the dominant group of works is an episodic series that makes up an extraordinary, imaginative recreation of his father's wartime experiences of serving with the British army in Europe during the second World War. Ten years ago, at the behest of an American patron, O'Donoghue was also well into a commissioned cycle of paintings on the distinctly unfashionable theme of the passion of Christ. As the Sligo show demonstrates, the two strands of endeavour, the introspective and the public, have much in common.
One thing they share is a preoccupation with placing the human figure at the centre of a painting, and the template of figure and ground is probably as good a way as any of approaching this compressed, 10 year retrospective. For O'Donoghue the figure is both general and particular: the metaphysical idea of a human presence and the contingent, embodied reality of that presence in time and place. Just as the symbolic figure of Christ is, in the drawings and paintings, emphatically grounded in the emotion and physicality of human experience, so, arguably, O'Donoghue's father and mother (and, on occasion, other relations) seem to somehow transcend the external facts of their historical lives.
As with the figures, the ground of painting is the ground of time and place, but also, one feels, a more abstract kind of ground, or rather an absence of ground, a void. The paintings evoke the physical geography of the earth, and the historical geography of events. The forbidding expanses of Erris and the ominous, frightening world of Europe at war, an environment of uncertainty and menace, are historical landscapes that, in their immensity and indifference, dwarf the human presences within them.
Yet time and again, O'Donoghue points to the redemptive potential of living morally and honourably in the context of huge and indifferent historical forces - and, perhaps even more to the point, to the redemptive potential of remembering.
Remembering rather than memory because, as his work demonstrates, remembering is a subjective and creative process. Memory is "a huge intangible archive," endowed with meaning by being "given tangible form" in a work of art. The painter is akin to an archaeologist or historian, but is neither, is something else. This is explicitly indicated in paintings inspired by the "bog people", the exceptionally well preserved human bodies recovered from boglands. Throughout O'Donoghue's work, the image of the figure in the earth, or in water (to both of which he repeatedly returns), is suggestive not of death and burial but of regeneration and life.
The importance of remembering is also indicated in his pictorial treatments of a Roman sculpture of wrestlers. The intimate history of his father's wartime experiences is a narrative that exists outside the standard war chronicles. His father's experiences in Italy provide a direct link to a rich European cultural tradition, one that transcends the recurrent pattern of conflict and horror. With regard to these concerns, O'Donoghue lights on several images. One of them, that of the wrestlers, points to a capacity for cultural regeneration exemplified in the Italian Renaissance. The sculpture was one of the pieces of the Classical world that was, at the time, literally excavated from the earth and served to revitalise European thought. Remembering is not just a responsibility, a duty, but something essential to human meaning and potential.
O'Donoghue is a very accomplished painter, adept at creating beautifully textured surfaces, and has a penchant for dark, dark earth colours and tones, but also an instinct for luscious, creamy off-whites, pale blues and brilliant flashes of brighter colour. But one of the features of his work that is particularly evident in this selection is his extensive use of photography. His father, obviously intensely alive and aware throughout the war, took many photographs, and collected various images along the way. These and other images are frequently embedded in the surfaces of the paintings, sometimes more or less disappearing into the surfaces. The photographic image can be seen as emblematic of memory: specific, evidential, ambiguous, perishable, its meanings open to interpretation. But always we come back to O'Donoghue's exceptional respect for the integrity of the document. This certainly contributes to his work's claim to authority.
He is remarkably comfortable working on very large scales, and the Model, with its sequences of individual galleries, can readily accommodate some very large pieces and allow them breathing space. Although there is a lot of work on view here, the show still feels as if it might have been larger still, chiefly because there is the feeling that certain aspects of what has been for the artist a staggeringly busy 10 years are hardly alluded to at all.
