Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed: Stephen McKenna: Paintings, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until October 16th (01-6709093) Michael Coleman: 99 Books +, Cross Gallery, Dublin, until October 2nd (01-4738978) Patrick Redmond: Paintings, Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until September 25th (01-6791548).
The geographical centre in Stephen McKenna's paintings at the Kerlin Gallery is Bagenalstown in Co Kilkenny, where he now lives. He does range further afield, locally and in Europe, with views of the sea at a coastal town in Brittany, including views of bathers, and several studies of the interior of part of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, the home of Tintoretto's staggering Crucifixion and other works. The Bagenalstown paintings include views of the Barrow and its canal, the old mill and other buildings in the town, and busier compositions of people at work and play. Beyond Bagenalstown, there are studies of St Mullin's Church and well, a place that interests him because of its association with the medieval epic of Mad Sweeney.
The communal pictures, featuring builders, bathers and people enjoying their leisure, recall Breughel in their sense of teeming sociability. So despite the show's geographical centre of gravity, we are talking about something almost bewilderingly varied and compendious. It all holds together, though. There is, for one thing, McKenna's distinctive representational method, which is patient and deliberate. In the way he conveys things such as water splashing, or light shining through a window, or people engaged in simple actions, it can seem as if the physical world is being as much explained as depicted, presented to us in a simplified, clearer form. Objects have an enhanced presence, a dreamlike quality, as in the work of René Magritte or the Italian "Metaphysical" painters.
Part of this presence relates to McKenna's palette, which inclines to tonally muted colours with a curiously retrospective feeling - though there are exceptions. The near-pointillism of the Brittany scenes, with their conglomerations of pastel hues, is unusual. And the fall of light is always definite and integral to the shape and mood of a painting, obviously so in the case of a picture such as Man Watching the Moon and the Scuola Grande interiors, in which radiant sunlight floods into the shuttered first floor space of the building's upper hall from the wide stairway.
Light is one consistent preoccupation, and water is another. The Venetian light is bounced off the water of the lagoon, and elsewhere there is water, water everywhere. There are other, more subtle connections. The builders in the picture of that title are apparently labouring to construct something that culminates in a crucifix, perhaps a reference to the picture it faces at the other end of the gallery, the building that contains Tintoretto's unseen masterpiece. The interconnection is hardly incidental. Underlying the various strands of McKenna's picture-making and the different cycles of images is a concern with a cohesive philosophical vision, an ambition to achieve in painting a rounded picture of the world, so to speak, in all its complexity, and to encompass all aspects of life.
The centrepiece of Michael Coleman's 99 Books + at the Cross Gallery is the title project. There are, besides, a group of 12 colour drawings included in the show, though it is hard to figure out why. They don't add anything to the books, which is no particular harm, but they may just detract from them, which would be a shame, because otherwise the show is an exuberant, inventive pleasure and is beautifully presented.
Each book is unique, although there are consistent elements, including a concertina format. The unique aspect is that, between its red covers, each volume unfolds into a continuous watercolour. On the reverse is printed a sequence of line drawings exploring the interior and exterior of a house in Salzburg - Grodig 1 - where, a note with the exhibition informs us, Coleman is a regular guest. The bold red binding, with a white V on one board, is apparently derived from the shutters on Grodig 1. The whole project was put together in Austria, at the Traklhaus Print Studio, where the artist has also worked previously.
The printed drawings have a tentative, informal quality, consolidating a recent, representational trend in Coleman's work. There are even a couple of self-portraits incorporated in the interiors. The watercolours, on the other hand, are abstract and gestural and very free. Some generate ambient colour-worlds, others depend on dot and linear patterns, but practically all of them are buoyantly good-humoured, delighting in the opportunities presented by the format.
One could generalise and say that Coleman is an artist who usually works within, and responds well to, given strictures. But he also likes pushing at the limits, to the point where the whole framework is threatened with disintegration. Here, the two kinds of pleasurable space he evokes - the domestic spaces of the representational images and the imaginative space of the watercolours - complement one another and coexist in a state of happy equilibrium. The presentation is unorthodox and captures the spirit of the whole enterprise.
There are enough younger painters working in a realist vein in Ireland to make them something of an unaffiliated, informal grouping. Patrick Redmond, showing at the Molesworth Gallery, is one of them. He works on a small scale and mostly depicts workaday things, including such pop consumer items as Pepsi cans and confectionery, in a photographic manner. That is, his painterly technique deliberately emulates photographic effects, including shallow depth of field. Nobody has painted confectionery as well as Wayne Thiebaud, but Redmond evidently has something different in mind.
What he has in mind are a series of visual-verbal puns, titling the stacked ingredients for a fry Full Irish, or a crumpled ball of paper Bad Idea. This may well go down a treat with some people, but by going in this direction he is selling himself short. It's like making paintings with an inbuilt redundancy, short-circuiting each image. He's on more promising, ambiguous ground with the rumpled, taped Package, and some other pieces. He clearly has ability and instinct, but also a tendency to curb them.
