THE ARTS: The two main solo shows are the outstanding highlights of a strong visual arts strand at the Galway Arts Festival, writes Aidan Dunne
French artist Bernard Pras's father, Jacques Pras, once won a stage of the Tour de France, Bordeaux to La Rochelle. That was in 1948, four years before Bernard was born. His outline biography intimates that it was no fun having a professional cyclist as a father. The activity demanded obsessive commitment. When Bernard was four he was dispatched to live with his maternal grandparents for a few years. It was a happy time and, quite unwittingly, he was absorbing a particular atmosphere that would later, against the odds, form the basis of a flourishing artistic career.
His grandparents ran a grocery shop, but from the description it sounds like one of those terrific country shops that sells pretty much everything. The interior was crammed with merchandise in a miscellaneous-looking jumble, but, as is usually the case, it all made sense to madame la propriétaire.
Fast-forward to Bernard as an artist of some experience, manoeuvring his way towards the articulation of a personal, mature style. He has made paintings, but wants to make paintings in three dimensions, in some way he cannot quite figure out. He has long been a hoarder of bits and pieces: toys, bric-a-brac, books, anything that catches his eye. In a burst of creativity, he combines painting and a vast number of objects to create an anamorphic image - that is to say, an image that only makes sense when viewed from a certain angle. What is to all intents and purposes a miscellaneous but inviting jumble of objects, an Inventory, as he aptly titles them, suddenly clicks into focus.
That has been his modus operandi for the last five years or so, and, as his extraordinary portrait of playwright Tom Murphy (featured in The Irish Times on Tuesday) confirms, the results are ingenious and fascinating. If there is one ideal point of view, then the work can be photographed from that point of view, and, upstairs at the Aula Maxima in University College Galway (and, less satisfactorily, at various outdoor sites throughout the city centre) you can see large-format photographs of many of Pras's Inventories.
They are impressive. Judging by what is on view, he has settled into a pattern of making versions of iconic faces: Marilyn, Vincent Van Gogh, Einstein, Ché, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon. He does so with tremendous verve and inventiveness.
There is an air of fast, brilliant improvisation to the way he throws disparate objects together to come up with uncannily coherent and recognisable images. But the works are also interesting for their constituent details - toy guns for Ché, artists' materials for Vincent. The parade of icons may prove limiting, but he will surely branch out. His Louis XIV is amazing, literally fashioned from the contents of a grocery store - it could be Pras's tribute to his grandmother.
The other main solo show is also outstanding, which is indicative of the useful relationship that has built up between the festival and Paris-based curator Bridget Harte, who is associated with a total of three visual arts events.
Bavarian environmental artist Nils-Udo's . . . muir mas, nem nglas, talam ce . . . (. . . the beautiful sea, the blue heaven, the present earth . . .) at the Galway Arts Centre consists of a series of large-format colour photographs arising from a three-week spell Nils-Udo spent making work in the Connemara landscape this spring.
As luck would have it, it was an extremely wet three-week spell rather than during the fine weather. What struck Nils-Udo, though, as it has struck artists in Connemara for more than a century, was the sheer changeability of the weather and, more to the point, the light. The Icelandic expression, "In Iceland we do not have weather, we have examples of weather", could just as easily be applied to the west of Ireland.
Nils-Udo is one of a generation of environmentally aware sculptors - in fact, he started out as a painter - including Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Drury in Britain, who work in and with the landscape in a sensitive way. Rather than being, that is to say, an earth artist in the Richard Smithson, bulldozer sense of the term.
For his series, Ag Tarrac na Sine (Drawing the Weather), using what look like birch or hazel rods, he made an outline "drawing" of a domestic living-room, complete with picture window bordered by "curtains". This linear scaffolding stands in the midst of a beautiful stretch of unspoilt bog and water. The outline window frames the landscape, recorded over a variety of lighting and weather conditions.
The structure refers to the way we tame and domesticate nature, how we come to see it only in terms of something called landscape. The wider picture, extending beyond the confines of the picture window and the outline room, eludes us but is there nonetheless. Nils-Udo actually takes a fairly pessimistic view of our interaction with nature. Even his careful, tactful work, he says, "can't escape the inherent fatality of our existence. It harms what it touches". Out on the bog, he and his formidable team of assistants also created a number of other temporary pieces that have produced some strikingly beautiful images. These include a section of dry-stone wall inserted neatly into the side of a turf bank and a Falla Feidin (Wall of Sods), which is, as the title suggests, a section of turf wall standing enigmatically in a vast expanse of empty landscape.
In Nead (Nest), an oval compartment carved into a turf bank cradles a clutch of peat eggs. One of the good things about the work is the way it leaves out anything extraneous. Another is that it doesn't need much in the way of explanation, and is all the better for that.
There is an echo of Nils-Udo's mildly surreal juxtapositions, if in quite a different vein, in Joe Boske's show at Mulligan's Records on Middle Street. Best known, perhaps, for his festival posters and album covers, Boske is a long-time resident of the west.
His dream-like images combine meticulous realism with jarring disparities of scale and subject-matter, but all delivered with a gentle, meditative touch.
It's a long way from the agitation of Jim Kinch's Homecoming at the Kenny Gallery. Kinch, long resident in Australia, shows breezy and colourful, though formulaic, treatments of standard themes, usually featuring people at play.
Last year Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology's Cluain Mhuire Campus made a good venue for a notably strong group show of graphic art and, this year, Painting Without Numbers is something of a revelation. The exhibitors all work within the painting department on the campus and what the show reveals is that GMIT has a formidable line-up of painters on its staff. It includes Blaise Drummond's measured, droll speculations on nature and culture.
The show aims to demonstrate that painting these days is not a restrictive activity, but, to borrow Rosalind Krauss's phrase about sculpture, takes place within "an expanded field" - and, on the whole, it does so. But Drummond's nature/culture concerns are also a good indicator of what is going on, with Deirdre O'Mahony's beautifully textural accounts of organic surfaces, and Mickey Donnelly's lush, layered images inspired by the layers and patterns of plants. Fiona Murray also fits in well here.
There is a conceptual emphasis to the work of Jim Vaughan (an oddly gripping chronicle of everyday life), Alan Phelan and Michael Minnis. The other exhibitors are John Brady, Fergus Delargy, Dennis Farrell, Alice Lyons and Hazel Walker. All of them are thoughtful, considered artists and there isn't really a weak note in the ensemble.
French artist Anne Ferrer has long been fascinated by the "ambiguous relationship between human, animal and floral species", and to this end she has worked with pig imagery for a number of years. Her Esther Williams, a floating installation on the waterway behind the cathedral, is a tribute to the Hollywood swimming star andis a fairly startling, lividly pink extravaganza, good- humoured and funny - quite undeserving of the violence wrought upon it on the opening night of the Festival.
The Galway Arts Festival continues until Sunday, July 27th; www.galwayartsfestival.ie
