Reviewed: Under Black: Michael Coleman, Green on Red Gallery until November 18th (01-6713414); Martina Corry: Photogenic Drawings, Gallery of Photography until December 2nd (01-6714654); Ad Marginem: Gary Coyle, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until November 30th (01-8740064); Underswim, Laura Gannon, Temple Bar Gallery until November 26th (01- 6710073)
Things fall apart. Michael Coleman's paintings at Green on Red (plus several on view in the current Temple Bar Studios Group Show 2000 in the atrium space), with their scarred and ravaged surfaces, seem to have arrived at their present state by a process of erosion. What we see is not something cumulatively built up to a finished state but something made and then forcefully unmade. The show's title, Under Black, says as much, as does Coleman's remark: "In a sense the paintings are less made than discovered."
In each case, a thick black surface covering is attacked to selectively reveal layers of underpainting. It might seem that the painter is committing himself to chance, but he actually has a great deal of flexibility, both in terms of laying down initial colour and form, and of partly unearthing it. One of the work's constants is the cruciform of the stretcher supporting the canvas, which presumably becomes apparent when the surface is pressed repeatedly back against it as paint is scraped away. Several of the works in Under Black are quite beautiful, but it seems fair to say that Coleman is also concerned with a certain integrity of process, not necessarily with making something conventionally beautiful.
Two of his Temple Bar pieces, though, are seriously beautiful and read not so much as process-oriented exercises, more as lively reinventions of colour field painting. There is a relentless energy and concentration to his work, which has a real uncompromising presence. It is good to see an Irish painter working at this level of ambition.
Martina Corry's Photogenic Drawings at the Gallery of Photography are also concerned with surface. She has made photographs - each a unique print made without a camera - with creased paper surfaces and, in the case of one extraordinary series of miniatures, her own breath, as their subjects. Seeing the trompe l'oeil-like paper images, you are strongly tempted to reach out and touch them to see if the folds are real or represented, and the answer seems, confusingly, to be both. It sounds like an extremely limited schema, and on one level it certainly is, but it is also unexpectedly engrossing in its own subtle way.
For one thing, it brings us back to the very beginnings of photography, emphasising the immediate nature of its relationship to the world, at a time when digital technology is in the process of radically transforming the medium, something that gives the show an almost nostalgic quality.
There is a surprised, quizzical air to Gary Coyle's ad marginem show at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. A project that came about by accident and never set out to be art, it is an attempt to document in a full, rounded way his practice of swimming at the Forty-Foot in Sandycove. First he was prompted to try to photograph the sea and sky from the water, then he expanded his aims to record an entire year's daily swims. In an engaging catalogue essay (unusual enough), he recalls how it occurred to him that if Richard Long's walks were art, why not his daily swimming ritual? He doesn't care for Long's work, incidentally, and amused himself by composing spoof Long captions about going swimming.
His show consists of a number of elements: a series of colour photographs, a series of drawings complete with drawn frames and, in vitrines, the notebooks in which he obsessively recorded details of his swims, plus other related objects like train tickets. There is a gently self-parodic air to the latter, as though he is not so much claiming anything for the work as asking us what we make of it, because it sure beats him.
"Do we need yet more pictures of the sea?" he asked himself at one stage. If they're as good as these ones, yes. The photographs are terrific, conveying the huge, brimming, always threatening presence of the sea from the swimmer's perspective. Coyle is best known for his drawings, yet the drawings here, while very good and always interesting, are less easy with themselves. Basing them on photographs, he built them up in layers, erasing and working them over again and again. Theoretically, perhaps, this builds in a sense of duration, of the shuttling patterns of weather and tides.
The elaborate renderings of ornate picture-frames which surround them reflect the project's category shift from life to art, which is in a way the main subject of the show, though it's a conceptually obtrusive way of doing it. Perhaps this aspect of the work is a little unresolved, but if so it doesn't detract from a genuinely exploratory and enlightening project.
Laura Gannon's Underswim at the Temple Bar Gallery, which consists chiefly of a DVD projection of a three-minute 16mm film, is an atmospheric, well-produced but oddly slight work that is hard put to bear the weight of interpretative theory loaded onto it in a substantial catalogue essay.
In the film, the head of an older woman, her lips painted with conspicuously red lipstick, sways from side to side as though abstracted and lost in a daydream. Apart from one quick burst of distraction, there is not a lot else to it.
A press release cites Gannon as seeing the film as "a contemplation on the nature of the subconscious mind," but there is a nagging suspicion that in the end it relies too much on intentions and exegesis and not enough on the form and content of the work itself.
