Aidan Dunne reviews the latest in the visual arts.
Reviewed
Video Time, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until February 7th (01-6713414)
Colin Martin: Closer, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until January 31st
(01-8740064)
Mark Swords, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until January 29th (01-6617286)
Rolf Bier: Sky Candy Boulevard, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until February 7th (01-6708055)
The Green on Red Gallery's Video Time exhibition is a rare chance to see Richard Serra's black-and-white film Railroad Turnbridge, from 1976. Given that he is known for his massive, uncompromisingly architectonic steel-plate sculptures, this film is remarkably mellow, offering an insight into his thinking and the sources of his work. It is a straightforward look at the bridge in action against the background of a misty landscape.
What comes across is a love of the material - steel - and the heroic quality of the engineering. Serra's sculptures usually redefine their surroundings or make their own surroundings, and here he makes us look anew at a functional piece of the environment that most of us would hardly notice at all. His shorter Hand Catching Lead does what the title says and is strangely hypnotic.
Ceal Floyer's H2O Diptych juxtaposes two water containers. In one image water slowly comes to the boil, in the other an effervescent glass of water loses its sparkle - or is it cooling off? Hard to know and, one is tempted to add, hard to care, but it engages on some level. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky's 16X charts a Moscow tram journey purely in terms of the overhead lines; it is a kind of restless, kinetic line drawing. Darren Almond's time-related installation is heavy-handed but effective. In all, this is a good, compact showcase for the possibilities of art film and video, but the highlight is certainly the Serra.
Colin Martin's paintings in Closer, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, draw us into a world of representational uncertainty. They evoke the languages of cinema and photography with beautifully rendered images of birds and cryptic night scenes. In all of this they invite us to look - bird-watching is about looking for, and recognising, something.
But while that view of a figure in a forest, for example, may trigger recognition of a kind, in the light of its narrative associations any narrative promise is left unfulfilled. There is a lure, a promise in all of Martin's images that leads us to the space beyond the available light, into the deep shadows at the edges of the image. It is intriguing, thought-provoking work.
Mark Swords, at the Ashford Gallery, is a young artist, one of an emergent group (though not a group in any formal sense) of Irish painters who work in a cool, knowing and indeed knowledgable manner.
Knowledgeable, that is, about art history and current art practice. There is a touch of self-deprecation to Peter Doig Rip Off, which disarmingly acknowledges that Swords's painterly grammar is eclectic in terms of influences. In fact he doesn't disown any sphere of influence, and there are myriad references to all sorts of sources in the work, from high and low culture to the personal and anecdotal. The paintings function as notional spaces in which everything can be accommodated, albeit obliquely, in terms of colour, texture, image and pattern. In this promiscuity they are the opposite of formalist abstraction, but they are at the same time committed to formal resolutions.
In Sky Candy Boulevard, at the Rubicon, Rolf Bier's cheerful paintings of crystals come across as frozen moments of flowing processes. Masses of crystals fly across canvases and, much more effectively, the wall at the end of the gallery. Brightly coloured, like toys or sweets, they have a playful, uplifting quality. But the idea needs the scale of a wall to work. Isolated and bounded by the compositional rectangle, the effect is radically diminished. In a way the ideal venue for one of the wall paintings would be a public space.
