Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed: Maureen Gallace, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until September 3rd (01-6081116)
Maureen Gallace is an anomaly. Or, rather, her work is. She is well known for her small, stylised paintings of isolated houses and other buildings in idyllic settings. Their simplified forms and pastel colours exude peacefulness and tranquillity. You can see how people are drawn to them for the variety of positive associations they offer. Yet Gallace flourishes in the tough arena of contemporary international art, attracting the interest of dealers and curators who prefer the cutting edge to the cute.
The presence of her work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is a case in point. Surely her benign scenes are at variance with the Hyde's characteristically rigorous aesthetic? The solution to the riddle lies in the blank ambiguity of Gallace's work. Whether calculated or incidental, it means the work gives very little away and leaves open several avenues and layers of interpretation. You can take the paintings at face value, on a superficial level, and on past evidence the artist is unlikely to say anything that will disillusion you. But at second and third glance you are likely to start to question the simple, most straightforward reading of what you see.
First off, her show looks really good in the gallery. Small pools of colour sparsely distributed through the cast-concrete walls and bays, the paintings easily tame their surroundings. Then, while the archetypal Gallace incorporates a well-kept, expensive-looking timber-fronted house in a verdant setting, she also makes compositions devoid of houses and buildings of any kind. And - something we haven't seen before from her in Ireland - she exhibits paintings of people, including herself and, disconcertingly, Cat Stevens.
Her human subjects are built of the same formal blocks as her real estate, simplified into patterns of few, flattened colours, minimally detailed. Yet as with her views of buildings and landscape, Gallace has a knack for economically conveying the sense of what is in reality a visually much more complex scene, so we get an intimation of an underlying density and texture, emotional as well as physical, without literal elaboration. Each scene is skilfully distilled.
Her studies of people have the same retrospective, nostalgic quality as her views of comfortable Connecticut. She has always been forthright about the autobiographical nature of her imagery. The houses are real, identifiable, remembered. There are, though, oddities and incongruities about the way she paints them. We never see people, for example. They may be out of sight, inside the buildings or beyond the screens of trees, but they might as well not be, because there is a distinctly deserted feeling about the pictures. The effect is that the painter, and by extension the observer, enjoys a curiously privileged relationship with the scene, one akin to ownership. What an accompanying note describes as "a Sunday quietness" extends even to the roadways that occupy pride of place in some paintings. Again, the roads seems to offer privileged access to a charmed realm.
It could be that Gallace's point of view is located at a precise point of adolescent or teenage experience, relating to a luxuriance in a personal, imaginative space, a licensed self-absorption. It has been suggested that there is an underlying sense of unease in her images, an ominous note in their very quietness and lack of incident. Apparently, she rarely incorporates doors in her views of buildings, so that they are, figuratively speaking, psychologically enclosed spaces, affording no access or escape - which could be a reassuring quality, incidentally, suggesting comfort and security.
There is a rich vein of literature and film based on ideas about what lies behind the bland shiny surfaces of the various manifestations of the American dream, from the surrealism of David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks to Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, from Sam Mendes's American Beauty to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. It is appropriate that Moody, who brilliantly explores the spiritual emptiness underlying suburban affluence, has written about Gallace's work.
She is a painter of a world of surfaces, and it is natural to ask what is going on behind those surfaces, whether something darker is implied by their insistent brightness. In the event, it is a fair bet that, in her Connecticut, nothing nasty is lurking in the woodshed, at least in the Grand Guignol, David Lynch sense. This is not to say hers is a domain untouched by anxiety, doubt or melancholy. There is a subdued, reflective moodiness to her obsessive dwelling on memory and place, more suggestive of a continuing search for meaning than a straightforward recollection of a golden age. But in this she appeals to common experience, adding another layer of accessibility to her images.
In terms of painting, she can be seen in relation to Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi and Alex Katz, and photography and cinema are also important. Although her work runs the risk of toppling into sickly-sweet sentimentality it never does so, because she is very disciplined in her approach, restrained to the point of austerity. And, like Katz, she is cool and offhand in the way she delivers her images. Perhaps she is slightly shakier dealing with people than buildings, but the show is impressively cohesive.
