There should be some interesting critical responses to the work of David Murphy, a relatively unknown artist who at the age of 30 is enjoying an extraordinary retrospective - entitled Cypher: Twenty Years of Panic Art - which will be launched at a champagne reception on Thursday evening in the Oisin Gallery in Westland Row, Dublin.
Donal McNeela's Oisin Gallery has traded in Dublin for years but in recent times some intriguing properties have passed through it - Picassos, early Francis Bacons, Brigit Rileys. Now, in championing Murphy's work - and producing a colour catalogue which delves into the adolescent minutiae of Murphy's teenage years, and places these and more recent work alongside images by Picasso and George Grosz - the Oisin is taking the kind of risk which is very unusual in the quiet backwaters of Irish gallery art.
The main surprise is that a lot of Murphy's work has to do with the solipsistic world of his sexual life and, most controversially, the enormous influence of hard-core pornography on his imagination.
The show contains many explicit paintings of ecstatic, theatricalised coitus; while others involve pornographic imagery directly collaged onto the canvas.
Murphy has also produced self-portraits of self-mutilation and howling anguish, or blunt depictions of the packaging of psychiatric drugs and anti-depressants. There's lots of urgently scrawled text concerning consciousness, memory, language, intractable issues of charged male sexuality, and the druggy youth subculture he encountered in his early 20s.
I first met Murphy in 1993 when he was a scarcely socialised young guy whose manic conversation was peppered with an eyebrow-raising sweep of literary and artistic references, most of which he had consumed in complete isolation. He seemed to eat biographies of artists like Picasso or Balthus for breakfast, and swung wildly between messianic faith in himself as an artist and a crippling lack of self-confidence and, as he says himself, "nothing in between".
David had had a sheltered but deeply traumatic upbringing and as a teenager was hospitalised three times after suicide attempts. Yet during this period, he produced well over 1,000 works of tormented art.
It is all very studied in its intent - here an exercise in pointillism, there a homage to Jean-Michelle Basquiat. Technically, it is extremely uneven but the best work grips with its flailing spontaneity, its wilful shattering of taboos of penile sexuality, as in Capitalism and the Money Shot, surrounded by self-excoriating texts painted in wonky schoolboyish handwriting.
And no matter how wild the work, it was always executed with the best oil-paints money could buy, and on the choicest French linen - materials Murphy frequently prioritised over food.
Dublin galleries failed to show any interest. Eventually, I and others helped organise some lowlevel shows at the Ormonde Multi-Media Centre, and the Garden of Delights bookshop; the "debates" which generally descended into screaming matches.
At the time, Murphy's work was mutating into large, almost Pollock-style canvases, which still contained sexually explicit imagery and later into Symbolist territory, like Night of the Dead Painters, another self-conscious homage to Antonin Artaud.
AROUND this time too, Murphy began writing the Panic texts, enormous swathes of poetry, maxims, fantasies, rants against radical feminists such as Dworkin, and indeed the "panic biography", which spans his earliest memories to his unfurling social life, and is written with scorching honesty.
It mercilessly documents the Dublin nightlife of recreation drug-taking and unhappy sexual encounters.
The text, as it circulated in various drafts, led to rows between people as it emerged that Murphy was writing virtually every conversation and bitching session into art-history.
When Paul O'Kelly, manager of the Oisin Gallery, saw the work, he had what he calls "an epiphany." He immediately brought Murphy's work into the gallery, although he kept the paintings way down at the back, facing the wall lest they cause offence. Thanks to O'Kelly, the paintings, which a few years back you couldn't get arrested with, have been walking out the door with price tags in the thousands.
Murphy is one of the few people who actually confesses to being a consumer of pornography, a huge, hidden industry which arouses enormous emotion whenever it slouches into the light.
Murphy's "panic biography" documents how his former psychotherapist, having sympathetically listened him out years ago, roundly condemned pornography in feminist terms the last time the issue ruffled the letters page of this newspaper.
But feminism is a broad church. Murphy's bedrock tome is Linda Williams's 1990 history and psychological analysis, Hard Core and he often remarks that, ironically, 90 per cent of academics writing about pornography, mostly in the US, are women.
His engagement with pornography is a solitary one and he refuses to be politicised or engage with the more exploitative aspects of the porn industry.
Interestingly, O'Kelly invited Olive Braiden, former director of the Rape Crisis Centre, to write a catalogue essay for the show.
Braiden writes in full awareness that, in a sense, her role is to contain or deflect any "feminist diatribe" the work might elicit.
She comes down on a fairly traditional, if fuzzy, feminist line on the troubled border between "the erotic" and pornography. The latter she regards as exploitative and, therefore, unacceptable.
She is particularly troubled by Murphy's collages of pornographic magazine, asserting that "none of this source material could have been created without exploitation, danger and degradation".
However, she admits to finding herself "revisiting and revising my initial reaction" and, intriguingly, seems to oscillate between attraction and repulsion at Murphy's work.
Personally, I still find a lot of it powerful, tragic and disturbing, even if much of it represents a closed chapter in the artist's earlier life. But go see for yourself.
Cypher: 20 years of panic art opens at the Oisin Gallery, Westland Row, Dublin, on Thursday
