VISUAL ARTS: Irish Times art critic, Aidan Dunne reviews four Dublin exhibitions: Sarah Spackman at the Solomon Gallery; The Landscape Sirens at the Origin Gallery, Eoin Butler's Shower at the Ashford Gallery and Dennis Wheeler's Painting with Paper at the Hallward Gallery.
Sarah Spackman is a vary capable representational painter whose work has developed impressively and consistently through a series of solo exhibitions at the Solomon Gallery. The paintings in her current show there are no exception. She could be described as a straightforward, even conservative academician, in that she applies herself to a few traditional categories of subject - the nude, still life and, although not in this case, landscape - approached in a traditional manner.
That manner owes a great deal to Cézanne in the way each work is a carefully organised compositional structure in which colour is laid sparingly on a strong though understated linear scaffold. As filtered through the Euston Road School, this general approach makes up a distinctive strand of English painting. Carried to extremes, it results in the obsessive measurement of Euan Uglow. It could be argued that this way of working in relation to these subjects is exhausted or redundant. But Spackman has something to offer: she has a vision of her own, one that comes through in her work.
This show sees her push forwards in terms of both figurative and still-life subjects. The former, in the minority, have a poignance and a sense of presence that make them real figurative paintings rather than academic exercises. Each figure is rendered with an architectonic precision but also with something like tenderness, so a sense of a living, isolated being comes through, perhaps partly because of the poses used.
Spackman remarks that "the air surrounding the subject" is as important as the thing itself, and this is particularly evident in the case of her still lifes. One of their strongest points is the way she creates a space for our eyes to inhabit.
It is this feeling of being offered a way into a calm pictorial arena - being offered a breathing space, so to speak - that is especially appealing. Although she is generally judicious in her use of vivid colour, she occasionally lets rip with some bold blues and oranges, with mixed results. Restraint usually works best for her.
Oddly titled, The Landscape Sirens combines two very good shows of painting by Judy Hamilton and Angela Hackett. Hamilton's bold landscapes are fresh, immediate accounts of the sea and coast around Cill Rialaig, in Co Kerry. There are studies of crashing waves and stormy seas, and one gets the feeling that the painter experienced a fairly dramatic storm there which may have galvanised her work. It is as if, like the story about Turner strapped to the mast of a ship battered by stormy waves, she surrendered herself to her subject, breaking down the barrier between looking and feeling, so that she was immersed in the atmosphere. Melita Denaro makes comparable and equally convincing paintings on the north coast of Donegal.
At first glance, you might think that Hackett's paintings are loose, gestural abstracts, pure and simple. Certainly she delights in the free play of layered, overlapping colour glazes, but there is a delicacy and a precision to her pictures that are unmistakable while not at all detracting from their air of spontaneity and freedom. A big painting such as Shoreline is a formidable piece of work. In her titles she is very specific about the sources for each image. These vary, but it is no surprise that garden and natural settings keep cropping up, given her liking for free-flowing, organic forms and vegetative and floral colours. There is also her consistent practice of composing her paintings around central clusters of activity. Each painting, that is to say, is a bit like a flower, concentrated in a central bloom, and each is persuasive, meditative.
Eoin Butler's Shower is a series of paintings based on the routine of the morning shower. It's a reasonable premise for a sequence of work. After all, Bonnard made numerous wonderful paintings thanks to his wife Marthe's habit of spending hours each day in the bath, while Francis Bacon made a number of more violent, angst-ridden figure studies set in bathrooms. As it happens, Butler's work is reminiscent of Bacon's in several respects.
It shows some of Bacon's pictorial devices - distorted figures rendered in a blurred, painterly shorthand, isolated in cagelike props against stylised grounds, though without the feeling of existential rawness. There are a few tentative bids to explore the tensions within a relationship in terms of the rituals of bathing, but overall Butler doesn't really develop his theme, preferring to play around with pictorial ideas in an ultimately loose, noncommittal way, which is disappointing, given that he is clearly capable of more, both technically and thematically, as a couple of works, including a self-portrait, indicate.
Dennis Wheeler, showing Painting with Paper, has a distinguished record as a graphic designer. He is responsible for a lot of Time magazine covers, not as a typographer but as an image man. His forte is the ability to come up with forceful images, fast.
His pacy inventiveness is evident in the mixed-media works, which mingle photography, paint, collage and charcoal.
I hope it's no insult to say there is a throwaway quality to these works, in that they display his liking for breezy visual puns and juxtapositions. His designer's instinct runs deep, so that, despite their virtues, these works seem almost misplaced as framed, finished pieces in a gallery. With their instant impact and visual cleverness, a book would probably be a more natural habitat for them.
Reviewed
Sarah Spackman, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until February 19th (01-6794273)
The Landscape Sirens, Origin Gallery, Dublin, until February 28th (01-4785159)
Eoin Butler, Shower, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until February 27th (01-6612558)
Dennis Wheeler, Painting with Paper, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until February 21st (01-6621482)
