Visual Arts Aidan Dunne Reviewed:Of Weight and Wings Michael Warren, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until Feb 25 (01-6612558) Shift Susan Connolly, Stone Gallery until Feb 17 (01-6711020) Without a Parachute Moxie Dublin, The Back Loft (concluded)
Michael Warren is one of relatively few Irish sculptors to have worked convincingly on a very large scale - that is, on a land-art, earth-shaping scale. Tulach a'tSolais, a huge bisected earth mound in Co Wexford, a project undertaken with architect Ronald Tallon, a long-standing supporter, is a case in point. Warren is best known for his often monumental constructed wood pieces, though he does work on a much smaller scale as well.
For most of the time, wood is his preferred material. You could say that he intervenes only minimally with the natural properties of the wood, but his work, though usually minimal in form, is not Minimalist in the art historical sense of the term.
Rather there is always a metaphysical preoccupation at its heart. Not that this is explicitly spelled out in the work, but in Warren's basic language of form, the twin axes, horizontal and vertical, and physical forces and pressures, are the stage on which the drama of being is played out. A striving, upward momentum, a pull to earth, a tearing apart and a concentrated though tenuous presence: all figure in pieces that refer to being and embodiment in tragic terms of struggle and redemption.
The ancillary works in his RHA exhibition, Of Weight and Wings, fit into this scheme of things, but the centerpiece is, literally, as much a space as a structure. It's disconcerting to encounter, precisely because where you expect to find one of Warren's arrangements of vertical wooden pillars, making the most of the Gallagher Gallery's exceptional height, you instead see empty space.
In fact, the absent construction is there in spirit, in a way that is entirely consistent with the logic of his work.
Most of the gallery floor space is taken up with a white-painted platform, described accurately enough as a Piazza. While such horizontal structures are not uncommon for him, the scale is exceptional, and Warren cites a particular source of inspiration. He was, says, struck by the unusual paved platform that forms a base for the crucifixion in Mantegna's painting Le Calvaire in the Louvre in Paris. One can see why the painting made an impression on him. Everything about it bespeaks the fascination with the depiction of three-dimensional space evident in work by artists of the Renaissance. There is an extraordinary, idealized, geometric clarity to Mantegna's description of the platform and the three wooden crosses emerging from it.
A wooden cruciform has long been a key shape for Warren. What he has given us in the Piazza is a stage, a charged arena, one that, instead of presenting us with a pre-existing object or image, leaves us with our own thoughts.
With scrupulous attention to physical reality, Mantegna has studded the base of the crosses, where they are set into the stone, with wooden wedges to hold them steady. The wedge form, with its multiple associations, is another staple for Warren, and the platform is effectively shaped like interlocking wedges. It is a bold statement, in the sense that it is audaciously understated: one could come into the gallery and reasonably ask where exactly is the sculpture. One might argue that it has disappeared, but that we are left with the legacy of its having been. A bit like Western metaphysics.
Susan Connolly's paintings, in Shift at the Stone Gallery, are works in disarray, and deliberately so. It is as if many of them are in the process of simultaneous assembly and disassembly. Connolly brings a number of elements to bear, using repeat patterning, the texture of the canvas, bold, bright, toy-like colours, geometric figures and forms, and more amorphous, cloudlike forms. Some of her surfaces relate to printed fabric patterns; she uses the pigment itself as a kind of fabric, peeling it back from the support, imprinted with the weave of the material.
The overall effect is of flux, of a continual becoming, as though the paintings are forever in the making, caught in an indeterminate state. Yet, at the same time, this state is where they belong, Connolly implies. Even the title of one of them, Colour Chart 2, emphasises the zone of potential they occupy. It's bit like being in a designer's workshop in the midst of a brainstorming session, surrounded by bolts of cloths and trial pieces in progress. Connolly deconstructs the conventions of pictorial structure as we know them, but also reassures us that the resultant uncertainty is no bad thing.
Recently we have seen more and more artist-initiated exhibitions, and the Back Loft has become one of the prime venues, with a rapid turnover of projects. Pádraic Moore's Don't Cry - Work! sums up the spirit and kicks off there this evening. It follows on from Without a Parachute, a lively group show featuring the work of a number of young artists who make up Moxie Dublin.
What was particularly impressive about the show was the collaborative spirit involved. It was effective as an ensemble piece, with no one hogging the limelight too much.
None less so than Aoife Merrigan, whose Big Bandit, a three-dimensional architectonic drawing made with elastic cord, was quietly outstanding.
Rory Draper's magpie installations, ingeniously dependent on audience participation, elicited plenty of it. Wit and lively inventiveness were evident in much of what was on view, including Ross Mackay's Disco Bum, Hannah Doyle's installation This is Not a Zoo, Jonathan Curran's prints and Sheena Dempsey's idiosyncratic reworking of Sherlock Holmes. Keith McCann's studies of functional pieces of street furniture make a terrific photographic series.
