It's probably fair to say there is an obsessive quality to most - if not all - kinds of creative activity, and this applies to painting as much as to other discipline, writes Aidan Dunne
Reviewed
Tomma Abt, Douglas Hyde Gallery until Sept 29, 01-6081116.
Tales of Innocence and Corruption, Desmond Shortt, Ashford Gallery until Sept 22, 01-6617286
It's striking how often painters, when describing the day-to-day practicalities of what they do, speak in terms of being locked into a process, as though stuck with an argument that they have not initiated. The picture demands to be sorted out, but by some means that defies articulation or rational analysis. They just have to work their way through it.
This implicitly obsessive aspect of painting comes to the fore in Tomma Abt's work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. German-born and London-based, Abt makes paintings to a uniform, modest scale. They are smallish, domestic easel paintings in an era of huge, billboard-sized museum pieces. A note accompanying the show informs us that she builds up her finished works in a prolonged, incremental way, layer over layer, methodically ticking off the possibilities presented by an initial substructure.
Although they share a scale and a method of making, the paintings themselves differ significant from one another in appearance. One consists of a single, undulating, squiggly line against a dark background; another of a number of patterned motifs finished to a high level of detail, for example. It's as though, depending on and constrained by their given starting points, they evolve in different directions. To an extent, they are about the nature of the process that shapes them.
That process is arbitrary in that there is no particular aim - such as a representational task - to Abt's starting or finishing points. To judge by the smaller, less worked pieces on paper, her starting points are not particularly distinguishable from doodles. But it's as if, once the nature of the marks has been established, pretty much on a whim, Abt adheres religiously to it.
She talks of "aiming for some kind of perfection of this mind construct that is totally irrational". Painting is, in the end, not rational. Or, what makes a painting succeed or fail is not rationally calculable.
Perhaps "perfection" is not the appropriate word. From the opposite perspective, one could say that she is aiming for a point of conclusion that makes the picture bearable to herself, a point where it ceases to be a source of irritation, where it doesn't draw her back for re-engagement. There is, to put it mildly, an obsessive-compulsive undercurrent running through this.
What does it mean to describe "the finished work being close to the essence, or distillation, of all that has gone before"? That the painting we see is the sum of the possibilities presented by its starting point and along the way? This essence is a matter of intuition at every stage. It is almost as if Abt is trying to sidestep all that a painting might conventionally be, to elude the standard choices. Yet even by default she arrives at an Abt style. She has a varied but ultimately consistent, distinctive palette. The forms she devises and uses are geometric or anomalously her own. They too have a certain level of consistency.
Most of all, perhaps, there is a tightness to her pictorial method that is very distinctive. The spontaneity of the doodle is progressively tamed and fixed, obsessively burnished.
All of which makes her work interesting and provocative. An odd ambivalence emerges. There is a feeling that she wants the paintings both to be her and to not be her. She makes them according to arbitrary, self-imposed rules, but lets them take their own course within the limits defined by those rules. They are her rules, but she has no vested interest in them, no expressive claims. That is, she wants to remain at one remove, making paintings that are allegories of painting, in a sense - exploring its processes and possibilities but at the same time curiously non-committal.
An enthusiastic exponent of contemporary Rococo and Baroque, Desmond Shortt is anything but non-committal in his paintings at the Ashford Gallery. His Tales of Innocence and Corruption are fantasy extravaganzas - preposterously camp pictorial inventions. They feature an eclectic cast of characters, including anthropomorphic, Disney-like cartoonish animals, fairy tale princes and princelings and wildly pneumatic, shapely nudes. These various exotic actors are deployed against strikingly evoked storybook forests and castles. Symbolic emblems such as pennants and cloaks, cages and staffs, together with fabulous garments and draperies arranged in swirling, symmetrical patterns suggest the stuff of such fantasy narratives as Lord of the Rings.
Yet while Shortt constructs a recognisable and consistent fictional space, a magic-realist arena, and stocks it with elements of tales of quest, destiny and eroticism, he doesn't actually tell stories. There is an air of playfulness, of dressing-up, in his images. He has surely been influenced by a group of American painters who came to prominence in the 1990s, including, notably, John Currin, best known for his ongoing series of self-consciously grotesque cheesecake figures.
Shortt doesn't stop short of pushing things over into the grotesque himself. Several of his female figures are inflated to absurd proportions and depicted with heady exuberance. You could say his paintings too are absurdly inflated, featherweight concoctions, as frothy as Fragonard, that threaten to float away. Yet they are persuasive. The occasional reference to a Rococo exemplar, as in The Swing, seems warranted. They manage to draw you into their world of wild fantasy. With The Prince's Companions, which features the nude prince regally posed with animal attendants, Shortt gets his own blend of whimsical fantasy exactly right.
