Visual Arts: Metamorphosisby Paul Doran at the Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street; Dedicated to Federico Garcia Lorca, by Sean Scully; Outsideby Orla Whelan and Don't Cry - Work!, curated by Pádraic E Moore.
Metamorphosis, Paul Doran.Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street. Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm. Until Mar 17. Tel: 01-6713414.
Dedicated to Federico Garcia Lorca, by Sean Scullyat the Instituto Cervantes Dublin, Lincoln House, Lincoln Place Tues-Fri 11am-5pm. Until Mar 22. Tel: 01-6311533.
Outside, Orla Whelan.The Return, Goethe-Institut, 37 Merrion Square. Until Feb 28. Tel: 01-6611155.
Don't Cry - Work!,Curated by Pádraic E Moore. The Back Loft, St Augustine Street (Off Thomas Street) Ended Feb 17
Paul Doran made a big impression with his MA graduation show. It consisted of a series of tiny, thickly painted oils, each concentrated and luscious, each overtly attractive but also technically rigorous in the way the medium was pushed to its absolute limits. Thereafter, he continued along this route until, a year or two back, he changed stylistic tack. He still built up thick masses of pigment, but colour was more sparingly employed, and linear structures began to emerge out of the erstwhile maelstroms of paint.
Following on from these developments, in his new show, Metamorphosis, at Green on Red, he comes across as being fascinated by architectonic spaces, as they are represented and mediated in painting. Previously, we have seen him try to get into the minds of the late medieval, pre-renaissance artists who laid the groundwork for western painting. It was as if he wanted to go through the same perceptual and intellectual processes, to learn what they had to teach by retracing their paths. His sources this time around may be more wide-ranging, and he seems more determined to devise an imagery of his own to deal with the material.
Structures and spaces still dominate. Samuel Beckett said the Italian painters "surveyed the world with the eyes of building contractors", a reference to their rapt absorption in the process of describing a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. The task was demanding and interesting but, Beckett implied, predictable. He wanted to see what lay beyond this art of the possible. Doran presents us with a succession of strange, roughhewn structures.
Some come across as being paintings of paintings, others agglomerations of walls and openings, Escher revisited by Heath Robinson. He relishes optical conundrums, springing perceptual traps and trapdoors, suggesting openings and gaps that are ellipses not just in the depicted structures but in the whole representational scheme, in the building contractors' plans. In some respects, he evokes the late Philip Guston. The key to these paintings may lie in the show's title. We are never allowed to settle into a depicted world. Every time we try to, another trapdoor falls away beneath our feet. Each potential space we are offered gives away to another, conflicting one, as though Doran is determined to keep us on our toes.
Sean Scully and Lorca may sound an unlikely combination, but the correspondences are there, and they make Dedicated to Federico Garcia Lorca a particularly rewarding experience.
The show, which inaugurates the new city-centre location of the Cervantes Institute, consists of a suite of etchings made in response to selected Lorca poems. An oil painting is also included: one with a vertical inset, suggesting that the whole composition could be read as a figure in a landscape.
Scully is an uncompromisingly abstract artist, but something about the mixture of austerity and sensuality that characterises his style suggests a sympathy for Lorca's highly charged use of language, which is similarly spare but weighted with intense feeling. In the selected poems, the language is fiercely sensual, acutely responsive to scale, texture, temperature, to light and shadow, aridity and moisture, and saturated with colour: with blue, silver and gold, yellow and "oleander red", white and black. Without skipping a beat, Scully is at home in this emotional range.
It is fundamental to his way of painting to play the fallibility of the gesture against the geometry of the grid. Here, in contrast to the finely nuanced internal divisions of each composition, the sharp borders of the etching plate impose a discipline that sits well with the nature of the project, concentrating each piece in relation to its companion poem. His palette, too, with its burnt, sombre tonality, is right for the job. Poems and images are aligned side by side, with plenty of space. It is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding shows in Dublin.
In Outside at the Return, Orla Whelan shows just three paintings. Their almost-blankness complements the busy architectural interior. At first glance, they hardly offer any intimation of an image, not quite as dramatically as is the case with Paul Nugent, but still, you have to keep looking. Gradually, it becomes clear that each is a bleached-out view of a deserted, rural road. One runs straight off into the distance, the others curve away.
Usually, and in this case, roads have the task of drawing us into the pictorial space. But at the same time, the insubstantiality of the images lends them a flickering, uncertain presence, as though they are vague, distant memories. In a quiet, careful way, the work manages to square up to two interrelated areas of exploration: the mechanics of painting itself, and memory.
The black loft has become a lively venue for, mostly, artist-curated projects, usually of short duration. Pádraic Moore's Don't Cry - Work!, which concluded last weekend, was particularly ambitious, involving the participation of nine or so artists from home and abroad, with a series of readings from key texts and a performance strand by Aleana Egan (indirectly), and Brigid McLean - wearing sculptural costumes. There was a strong alternative flavour to the whole enterprise.
In his catalogue introduction, Moore pointed to an underlying attitude or feeling, rather than theme or style, as the common thread. Disenchanted and wary, the artists nevertheless persist in an optimistic engagement with artistic practice. The spirit brought to mind the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, with its faith in an unofficial, underground level of reality, somehow surviving despite the machinations of various antagonistic establishment forces.
Among the highlights were Oisín Byrne's feel-good Friendly Energy Being and Gary Farrelly's contributions, perhaps the best of which were his dossiers of material relating to his consistent areas of interest: bureaucracy, transport networks and other kinds of systems. Also fascinating was American Robert Hawkins, whose drawing Bride Hanging By Her Feet was typical of his work: genuinely funny, but in a thoughtfully disturbing way.
