Reviewed Felim Egan, paintings and works on paper, Kerlin Gallery until Feb 10 (01-6709093) Philosophy of Furniture, Eamon O'Kane, Ashford Gallery until Feb 1 (01-6612558)
A quick glance around Felim Egan's solo show and you might think: haven't we seen this before? To some extent we have. Egan is an exceptionally focused painter who employs a spare pictorial vocabulary, one springing from formal abstraction but not confined by any prescriptive definitions. At a certain stage in the history of contemporary art, as Modernism fragmented into Postmodernism, the very words "formal abstraction" became something of the kiss of death for any artist.
The idea of the formal autonomy of the artwork became, and continues to be, anathema - the so-called New Formalism notwithstanding. But all of this is as much, or more, about interpretation as intention. Egan's paintings are a case in point. In the 1980s he introduced explicitly figurative and narrative themes. It seems fair to say at this remove that such an approach compromised his visual language, tying it down too specifically to representational content. Yet his work had always incorporated references to a world beyond the confines of the painting, had always enjoyed a symbolic relationship with a wider reality.
Music was an obvious point of reference and, latterly, aspects of landscape have become important. He happens to live and work in the midst of a striking urban landscape: Strand Road in Sandymount. The expanses of sand, water and sky, with the shifting atmospherics of weather, light and darkness, are definite if not obvious influences on the paintings. As are the chimney stacks at Pigeon House Road and, surely, the patterns of electric lights.
All these elements play a role in Egan's paintings, but in a way that echoes Godard's remark that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Things don't play their workaday representational role in Egan's paintings. He has devised a sandy-textured medium that usually forms the ground in his compositions, in any of several diverse colours, from austere charcoal grey to extraordinary sumptuous red. This ground is a literal ground - sand - but also the ground of the picture plane, extending to the edges and by implication beyond. He likes, when it is viewed as the latter, to make openings into it, as though we are seeing through the plane.
In his new work, it is also a celestial ground, the vast expanse of the sky. Arcs delicately inscribed across the canvas recall the movement of stars or moon across the night sky. He is technically very accomplished, building up beautiful surfaces of textured light, in which there is a singing, musical quality. He is very good with colour. One of the highlights of the show is a group of works on paper apparently made in Portugal. They have a vibrant light that is distinctly their own, and an intensity of colour.
Perhaps the question is whether all this amounts to anything more than formal play. But surely a painting is always something more. And Egan's work is very convincing. Despite some new subtleties, you could say there is nothing new in what he is doing but gosh, he does it incredibly well. He is fully committed to each piece, and each is thoroughly alive. What comes across is that his references to such things as aspects of landscape or astronomical endeavour have to do not with formal game-playing but with a profound immersion in the world.
At the Ashford Gallery Eamon O'Kane, an exceptionally prolific and capable artist, has titled his solo show The Philosophy of Furniture. His starting point was a piece written by Edgar Allen Poe for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1840. The piece seems to be lighter than the headline might suggest, offering a critique of American furniture. O'Kane seems to be primarily interested in pursuing his own preoccupation with the natural and the fabricated.
Previously he has explored the siting of Modernist architectural structures, whether grandly public, or more domestic and personal, in natural settings.
The drawings, animations and laser etchings here are inventive explorations of the dialogue between manufacturing and natural processes. His large-scale drawings of trees are made with charcoal - burnt wood - on paper that is derived from cellulose. Most of the trees are conifers, presumably grown in managed plantations for use in construction. Each laser etching features one item of furniture. The image is burned through a layer of paint so that it is formed by the substance of the masonite board beneath, composed of the rendered fragments of the conifers.
A number of images feature composite images, of trees growing through items of furniture. These recall a strange episode in John Fuller's novel Flying to Nowhere, in which the wooden or wood-derived elements that make up a study - shelves, chair, desk, books - come back to life and start to sprout leaves, twigs and branches, gradually overwhelming the human cultural project. It's a haunting image and, while there is nothing in O'Kane's show with quite that concerted effect, he does generate some fruitfully ambiguous, conceptually neat pieces.
