Both Micheal Farrell and David Godbold address defining moments of Irish history in their current exhibitions, but they are definitely not singing from the same hymnsheet. In The Wounded Wonder, at the Taylor Gallery, Farrell is fiercely engaged with issues raised by the Great Famine and Bloody Sunday. His anger is palpable and immediate. It is almost as if he had just tuned into CNN and seen the Famine reported as a breaking story.
More likely it's the result of an experience that a lot of people can relate to. It goes something like this: you know in a general way about a major event like the Famine. But then you read a detailed historical account and you find yourself astounded, involved, furious. It looks as if Farrell has taken this fund of emotion and translated it directly into painting.
In his Kerlin Gallery show, The Answer Garden, Godbold deals with imagery from the 1798 Rising, but he does so in a cool, distanced way, from behind a barricade of irony. The very model of a postmodernist, he knows that history is a hall of mirrors. So he offers us an amused commentary, not on historical events, but on the manner of their presentation, on the way ideologically weighted meanings are elaborately constructed from the malleable raw material of experience.
In a way, Farrell should be doing something similar. After all, though once an avowedly abstract artist, he moved into figuration because he wanted the freedom to comment on events.
The particular events that spurred him on were the early stages of the Troubles in Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s, and once he'd taken the leap he never looked back. He proceeded to author a non-stop visual commentary on the Troubles, on the state of the nation and on his own, often unhappy state, the latter in a series of entirely un-narcissistic, soulsearching works.
But he seems to have been sure, throughout, about his own sense of identity. Even when he was being bitterly critical of aspects of Irish life, most notoriously with his work referring to clerical sex scandals, he measures the sorry actuality against the ideal Ireland that he holds to. And his partisan involvement with his subject matter obviously derives from that: he knows where he's coming from and which side he's on.
For Godbold, identity is problematic. For his last one-person exhibition he even fabricated a new, notional identity for himself in the form of the fictional Able Badheart. This time around he makes several references to being categorised as English, in a way that suggests he wants to distance himself from identity as well as history.
The Answer Garden, he points out, is a poetic term for a prosaic computer function, whereby stock enquiries are directed to stock answers. It's visualised as an idealised Italianate landscape in a wall drawing. The show looks good, requires close reading and is consistently engaging. But Godbold cannot leave well enough alone. He keeps adding layers, asides, glosses and captions, most of which are puns which underline his, and by implication our detachment from the possibility of engagement.
Beyond the punning there is a dark undercurrent to his work that becomes apparent every so often and which holds out the promise of something more, something outside the loop.
Perhaps it's time he went easy on the irony and explored that side of things. As it stands, The Answer Garden seems to embody the postmodernist dilemma of being unable to adapt a position outside the all-encompassing systems of representation that it aspires to question. There's no way out of the hall of mirrors. So knowingness is the only recourse.
Farrell knows there are problems about appropriating historical imagery and he has obviously thought carefully about how to deal with his highly charged subjects. For the Famine he has devised a highly theatrical mise-enscene. The paintings are variations of a courtroom setting, with a cast including his trademark hound, a group of skeletons, Charles Trevelyan and the wounded wonders themselves, the potatoes (equated, in a typical visual pun, with skulls). He imagines an indictment of Trevelyan, whose laissez-faire policies were the official response to famine. It's a workable scheme, but the pictures don't quite make it. The ideas are deployed rather than effectively dramatised.
There's no theatricality about the Bloody Sunday images, perhaps because it is still relatively close in time. Based on contemporary photographic coverage, this is painting as reportage. Images of people lying wounded, dead or dying and those attending them are stripped of colour, detail, of any kind of visual elaboration, in fact. They are a sober, appropriate response to a terrible deed, though very roughness and lack of finish are like a tacit admission of the inadequacy of the gesture.
It's interesting that the other paintings in the show, not all of them new, are mellower, more reflective and very successful. They include a fine self- portrait, a view of the vines cut back in winter and views of the town of Cardet itself, Farrell's home in France.
The Wounded Wonder continues until July 18th, The Answer Garden until July 20th.
