VISUAL ARTS: WE SEE THE past in terms of the representational strategies used to describe it. This idea has been integral to the rationale of Margaret Corcoran's work. Her paintings have revisited historical eras with the aim of illuminating the world views implicit in the images and the ways they were constructed, generally with particular regard to the role of women in looking, seeing and making. Her engagement has been broadly critical and analytical.
In her 2007 exhibition, University, she drew on works by Manet and Degas. Manet's iconic painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, featuring a barmaid looking directly at the viewer, was translated into a picture of a Chinese woman, Tong, behind the counter of Corcoran's local supermarket.
Other images imagined Tong’s world, or how we might set about imagining it and it seems fair to say that Corcoran’s current exhibition, The Garden, at Kevin Kavanagh, takes off from this point of imagining.
It was up to us to interpret several of the paintings in University in the light of what we gleaned from others in the exhibition, and sometimes we were bound to be wrong. A mountain torrent turned out not to be, as it looked at first glance, a landscape in China, but one in Europe. Corcoran wanted to underline that the expectations we bring to an image help to determine what we see.
In The Garden, locations in Ireland, Europe and China are again juxtaposed ambiguously. All are imbued with a certain exoticism and, while one painting, The Castle, looks distinctly more European than Chinese, there is a homogeneous quality to the overall body of imagery. East and West, North and South are being treated with a visual equivalence, which might have to do with living in a globalised world, or might have to do with actuality and imagination.
The show’s title points to the fact that gardens are constructions in the landscape, orderly conceptions of paradise given concrete form. They are contrived spaces, not unlike paintings in some respects, but subject to many more variables and contingencies. While Corcoran is a painter of great natural facility, she also distrusts that facility, and distrusts representation itself. Her work in University recalled the casual, unfinished appearance of much of Degas’ painting, and her new paintings are also calculatedly sketchy and provisional, as though they feature an inbuilt commentary on the process of painting itself.
Each piece in The Garden prompts us not to take it at face value. Images are representationally faithful, but often on the point of dissolution. Some areas of a composition are mapped briskly in outline and filled in roughly with washes of colour that run freely down the canvas, while others approach the level of photographic verisimilitude. The results remind us that we are looking at something fabricated and incomplete, just as the sources are fabricated and incomplete. The implication is that representation is always problematic, but it is how we make the world around us in one form or another. The Garden is colourful, attractive, and thoughtful.
One of the best pieces, Never Work, is an urban landscape, a slice of a wall on a city building which has been decorated with a graffiti "garden", preaching a utopian message, just like an actual garden.
IN ADVENTURING, HER exhibition at the Cross Gallery, Kate Warner also delves into the idea of the exotic landscape. The paintings are small in scale but many of them feature vast expanses of mountainous terrain. There are much closer views of fragments of snow and ice-covered rock. Although she doesn't pin down locations, the titles refer to aspects of great mountain ranges, with references to glaciers, ice caves, passes, ledges and remote villages. We don't see any people, but if they were visible we would be sure of the nature of the engagement with the terrain. The occasional presence of lengths of climbing rope, coiled in the snow or hanging down a vertiginous face, is a good indicator of the kind of adventuring Warner has in mind. Such titles as Fall, Retreat, and On the Passalso suggest trekking and climbing.
It’s fair to say that she abstracts both her imagery and the idea of such expeditions so that the paintings assume an allegorical quality, referring to journey and quests in a symbolic way, and also to our feelings about landscape in that context – the romance of the adventurous traveller.
Two city views, Rooftopand Haze, might seem incongruous in relation to expeditions above the snowline, but actually they sit very well in the exhibition overall. As the term "haze" suggests, we see the outlines of buildings through an atmospheric veil, so that the city comes across as somewhere distant and mysterious. Warner works on gesso-primed boards, and the beautifully textured surfaces of her paintings look as if they have been made by a process of addition and subtraction, built up and scraped back. She is sparing in her use of colour, to great effect, and very good with light and shade: the radiant blue rooftops in Village have a magical otherworldliness about them, for example. These qualities don't really come across in reproduction, and should be seen at first hand.
The Gardenby Margaret Corcoran, Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin, until Feb 28th. Adventuring, paintings by Kate Warner, Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin, until Feb 28th
