PATRICK O'REILLY made an immediate impression on viewers at the Galway Arts Festival during the summer, and it was an enterprising follow-up for the Hugh Lane to give him another large exhibition within the year. Curiously enough, he has something in common with the Kienholz-Spero exhibition which ended in the same venue some time ago - particularly in the sense that his work often suggests the fairground or the circus booth, yet has wider implications.
The title A Silent Scream seems portentous and a gallery note further tells us that that "the power and influence of the collective consciousnes and its suppression of individual responsibility play a large part in O'Reilly's work."
This, to be frank, is laying the message (whatever the medium) on with a trowel. Even while in certain works the artist may be wearing his social conscience on both sleeves, the overall impression is of high spirits and prolific invention, rather than yet another, predictable breast-beating avowal of human guilt for the evils of the age, and of the world.
O'Reilly may take an occasional leaf from Jeff Koons's book, or indeed from various American mise-en-scene and quasi-pop artists of the past 20 years, yet his ideas are his own, as is his technical command.
In one tableau (it is hard to call it by another name) a minotaur figure in bullfighting costume stands over a fallen toy bull, while a video of an actual bullfight plays on in the background. In Quiet Desperation, four rows of puppet-like figures in cell-like spaces periodically shudder and move - a technical tour-de-force, whatever the symbolism.
It's a Few Years Anyway makes play with the confessional and with jukebox culture. The title piece, A Silent Scream, looks at first rather like a return to Gunther Uecker's spiky, rippling kinetic pieces of the 1960s, but turns out to have a human face ingeniously embedded in its plethora of pointed sticks.
It is by its sheer visual impact and technical versatility that the exhibition impresses, not by its sometimes naive philosophising or pummelling of the obvious.
O'Reilly does not belong to the prolific - and for the most part boring - tribe of conceptual/installation artists who, first pick on an idea (usually quite unoriginal) and then laboriously illustrate it with an assemblage of bric-a-brac and an undigestible catalogue essay. He has primal invention, a sense of visual presentation and "happening", which makes his work rewarding - and entertaining - to look at.
Until January 19th
