Some jazz tunes stand back from the emotions implied by their titles, just as some jazz arrangements hold back from doing something as obvious as merely stating their source melodies.
Yet the melody and the emotion are usually there. This is not to argue that Patrick Fitzgerald's paintings, at the Rubicon Gallery, have a particularly musical, jazzy character, but at the same time there is something jazz-like in the detached artistry of his work, which is distinctly wary when it comes to engaging with the emotional and physical complexities of the world. But, while he is slow and considered in his approach to making pictures, he clearly doesn't shrink from spontaneous, split-second gestures.
Fitzgerald, born in Cork, brought up in London and for the last 10 years or so resident in Bilbao, says he works in "relative isolation". Fortuitously, of course, Bilbao has been firmly on the artistic map since the opening of the Guggenheim there in 1997. While he is an outsider in Spain, you get a sense that the kind of isolation Fitzgerald means has more to do with the pursuit of a concentrated, almost austere studio practice. And certainly qualities in his paintings suggest that they emerge from a deliberate, meditative process, a particular way of working that is characteristic of a sizeable number of artists, including Sean Shanahan and Richard Gorman, two other painters who happen to be based in Europe.
Fitzgerald's show is rather beautifully titled The Morning Hours. While his pictures are not representational, in their colouring, textures and other aspects, they do not contradict the mood evoked by this overall title. Modest in size, they are dominated by softly luminescent expanses of yellows, lemons, greys and whites, sometimes edged by deeper tones. Compositionally they consist, usually, of just a few regular surface divisions. A recurrent pattern has an angular form intruding into a central space. In a few instances this is carried further, in that the complementary form becomes a physical adjunct in its own right. There is an architectonic quality to the work, not only because of its planar nature, but because it comes equipped to engage with the surrounding architectural setting, whatever that happens to be.
The paintings are made on wood, mostly MDF, and some of them are deep, box-like constructions, emphasising that we are looking at objects in themselves, something further accentuated on occasion by holes punched or drilled through, and incisions gouged in the surface. These latter marks, whether in the form of straight lines or fallible, wandering strokes, are a kind of drawing, and they look as if they have been made with an electric router. So specific is the signature of the tool that it intrudes a little, almost like a figurative element, into Fitzgerald's carefully won contemplative space.
That odd touch aside, his paintings are very convincing. They fit comfortably with the kind of painting that has been described as being like everyday life, but everyday life lived at a level of concentrated intensity that occurs only occasionally.
STEPHEN McKenna's paintings, at the Kerlin Gallery, are diverse, subdued and distinctly self-contained, even inward-looking. This despite the fact that the energetic figurative presence is strong, stronger than it has been for some time in his work. There are, for example, studies of a group of figures engaged in a dance on the seashore, as if celebrating Lughnasa. As with Goya's Maja, they are depicted in two versions, one clothed, one nude. Despite the air of communal ritual, which is also evident elsewhere in the exhibition, McKenna's treatment of the subject is highly stylised and cerebral.
There is a more specific reference to Goya in the form of a version of the main, sacrificial figure in his masterpiece May 3rd, 1808, in which French soldiers gun down Spanish peasants. In McKenna's painting the figure is treated in isolation. The man's extreme emotion, detached from its horrific context, links him instead to Goya's studies of madness.
The two biggest paintings in the show are patient, careful studies of individual, full-grown trees, in leaf, viewed against expanses of prosperous-looking farmland. These are inland landscapes, but there are also excursions to the coast in a group of audaciously understated pictures featuring sea views at sunrise and sunset.
McKenna is similarly circumspect throughout more or less all the work on view here.
Yet somehow his mix of depictions of plants, landscape and figures generates quite a potent sense of a community bound to the land by bonds of history, tradition and belief. His evocations of primitive ritual and celebration seem of a piece with images of a rural environment that has been cultivated since time immemorial.
For all the Goya-esque references and torch-wielding crowds, this is a strikingly subdued show, partly, perhaps, because the dominant imagery is low-key and pastoral, partly because any inherent drama is understated, and partly because of McKenna's technical approach. Thinking back over the paintings, it seemed to me that not only had he evened things out by methodically stylising, perhaps you could say classicising them, to this end he had also minimised tonal variation to an exceptional degree. A cluster of mid-tones keeps everything calm and evenly paced. It is a subtle exhibition, at first glance wilfully quiet, but one that more than amply rewards time and attention.
Reviewed:
The Morning Hours, Patrick M. Fitzgerald, Rubicon Gallery until March 30th (01-6708055)
Stephen McKenna, paintings, Kerlin Gallery until March 16th
(01- 6709093)
