VISUAL ARTS: Aidan Dunne reviews Paul Morrison: Haematoxlyon, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, until October 5th (01-6129900) Elizabeth Magill: New Work, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (01-8741903).
The work of Paul Morrison and Elizabeth Magill relates to landscape without being landscape painting as such. Both deal with aspects of landscape and nature, but it is in terms of representations of landscape. It is as if for both the starting point is never nature itself, always a representation of it, a representation inevitably imbued with particular assumptions and structures. There is an underlying implication that we cannot see nature except in terms of these assumptions and structures.
In his exhibition Haematoxlyon, Morrison's cut-and-paste compositions - which are not literally cut-and-paste but do quote from and promiscuously mingle different sources within single images - are in stark black and white. He pilfers freely from such diverse originals as scientifically precise botanical illustrations and stylised cartoon graphics, and there is something cartoon-like about what he makes of them all. Not, though, in terms of levity.
Perhaps it's the abundance of black, as well as the severity of the contrast, but there is a distinctly ominous, brooding quality to his paintings and his huge, atmospherically strong wall painting.
There is a suggestion that, by restricting himself to black and white, he leaves it open to the viewer to project "colour from behind the eye" onto the compositions. As one specimen viewer, I'd have to say that didn't work for me.
Rather, the effect was to accentuate the abiding sense of alienation and distance from the problematic "nature" proposed in the images. That is, a view of nature as variously inaccessible, mysterious, managed, manipulated, sentimentalised, distorted and traduced.
It's a view that is appropriate to an era of chemically intense agribusiness, genetically manipulated crops, interpretative centres and environmental degradation.
Morrison's paintings are striking, even strident, and ultimately a bit harsh and limited. Perhaps the best part of his exhibition is a flickering video work in which nature imagery from disparate sources is edited and distorted to produce a haunting vision, one that recalls elements of the classic Disney cartoon Fantasia - with added strangeness and menace.
The Hugh Lane has bought a painting by Magill, Close, from 2000, and to mark the acquisition the gallery invited her to make an exhibition incorporating it and more recent work. She paints spectral images of moodily romantic landscapes: a copse of spindly trees in a misty dusk; conifers silhouetted in Close as the late evening light ebbs away from a lonely country road; a homestead, its isolation accentuated by a single electricity pole. Several of the smaller recent pieces, Magill says, were influenced by the incredibly deep, dark greens of Gustave Courbet's painting of woodland in the Hugh Lane's permanent collection, as well as by other 19th-century landscape paintings in the gallery.
There is an abiding melancholy to many of Magill's images, deriving in part from a stillness that verges on inertia, a stillness that is scarcely dispelled by recurrent views of birds caught on the wing. In one painting, though, Station, a single tree is slanted by a powerful gust of wind in an exceptional display of natural energy.
Although they are representational images, on closer inspection the paintings are not as straightforward as they might seem. They are built up in very thin washes of colour and unmistakably utilise chance patterns and markings. They are oddly offhand in terms of imagery. Magill would rather offer the merest suggestion of a representation than spell something out explicitly, and she pointedly incorporates ambiguous elements, such as glitter for stars or blobs of paint that, despite their representational duty, also read as blobs of paint. The painter Peter Doig does something similar, although he builds up surface textures much more. While relatively densely textured for her, even Magill's dark green paintings here, Beneath or Between, are thin-skinned.
The casual washes of diluted colour, the glitter, blobs and smudges - nudging reminders that we are looking at a representation (and, in fact, as she uses photographs as references, a representation of a representation) - could become tedious, and they do limit her room to manoeuvre. But she views them as a liberation. They free her from conventional landscape painter's duties - in other words, they allow her to open up expressly ambiguous spaces that do not depend on their resemblance to something else for validation.
If she wants to open up a space of some kind in a painting, an imaginative space, a space for speculation, it may seem counterproductive to eschew the potential of pictorial illusion. But for Magill that illusionistic space is a false promise. At a conference in the 1960s the still controversial French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida famously remarked that he didn't think there was any such thing as perception.
His statement can be interpreted as meaning that, by the time the act of supposed perception occurs, everything has already been decided, on the basis of those assumptions and structures referred to earlier.
Magill wants us to fall into the trap of assuming that we can read her paintings in a certain way, then present us with the realisation that we cannot after all do that. The real imaginative space for her, and for us, is the one that doesn't conform to our expectations but leaves us in a state of uncertainty. It's something that has always been close to the heart of her work.
