Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne casts a critical eye over the latest exhibitions
Reviewed
Gary Coyle: The Wild Wild Wood And Other Drawings, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until October 29th (01-8740064)
Eithne Jordan: Recent Landscapes, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until October 30th (01-6708055)
Nancy Wynne-Jones: Tirawley to Tir na nÓg, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until Saturday (01-6766055)
Kate MacDonagh and Harry Vince Coulter: Light, Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, run concluded
In the past Gary Coyle has made charcoal drawings based on photographs of crime scenes, mugshots of convicted killers and the sets of pornographic films. These thematic groupings could be thought of as distinct though related series, and there are examples of all of them in The Wild Wild Wood And Other Drawings, as well as some pieces that seem to signal new departures, notably Arcadia III and The Enchanted Castle. In the latter an apartment block is vaguely discernible through a screen of trees, an arrangement that recalls Peter Doig's paintings based on a landmark modernist building.
Both crime scenes and porn sets are uninhabited, so what we see are essentially straightforward interiors or exteriors. Why specify what is expressly missing from the images? Presumably, because the information colours our reading of them. It lends them an ominous or otherwise unsettling quality. The everyday is suddenly infused with the sense of another dimension, the feeling that something disturbing is hidden. Coyle's technique accentuates this effect. The drawings are heavily worked, with dense clusters and masses of black charcoal. In the show's title piece, the wood becomes a convoluted linear maze in which we might search vainly for clues about what has happened there. But there is nothing expressionist about Coyle's treatment. Rather, his images are dispassionately, precisely transcribed from their sources. The effect is forensic and downbeat.
There is a continual emphasis on what is unseen or what we cannot see. A drawing based on the bland interior of an apartment once occupied by terrorists planning September 11th is titled They Hid In Plain View. The baroque complication of Porn Foliage provides endless distraction for the eye but never allows us to settle, to identify a subject in the conventional sense, to actually see something. Coyle addresses the morbid fascination with crime of publications such as True Crime magazine or in the gloating tabloid coverage of the case of the killer Fred West - a room in West's house formed the subject of an earlier drawing. In this he runs the risk of subscribing to the culture of criminal celebrity rather than analysing it. His portrait, for example, of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is problematic. There is an obvious comparison to be made here with Marcus Harvey's notorious portrait of Myra Hindley.Whatever Harvey's intentions, they were eclipsed by his subject's iconic status.
At its core the fascination with violent crime that Coyle explores is ambivalent and voyeuristic, and he implicitly relates it to the appeal of pornography. It is as if his depopulated settings have been cleared for the next instance of sex or violence, because the appetite involved can never be satisfied, will always demand more, being ultimately driven by a desire for something beyond, something that ultimately cannot be depicted or seen.
What this might be is perhaps indicated in a visual quote from Holbein's The Ambassadors in another drawing, Petit Morte: the anamorphic image of a skull, skilfully concealed within the painting's polished representational surface, here transcribed to the bland interior of a porn set.
The landscapes that form the subject of Eithne Jordan's paintings at the Rubicon could be described as nondescript. They are rural but hardly ever pastoral scenes in which motorways and underpasses loom large, and they are punctuated by ordinary houses, building sites and stretches of scrub. There is a convincingly haphazard quality to them, in other words. They are depicted mostly in what looks like the warm pink light of early morning, which might explain the fact that they are unpeopled. Very occasionally, cars put in an appearance, but in the brighter, enveloping light of midday.
Jordan seems very comfortable in these anomalous spaces. On a small scale they can come across as relatively lush, with sunlight caressing layers of foliage and a palpable warmth in the air. But on the whole things are edited out rather than accumulated: Building Site II, with its foreground empty save for heaps of earth or sand, is typical. What the artist relishes is surely the potential offered by the space, the building site as metaphor. At times in the largest paintings - and large-scale paintings are a consistent and convincing part of her repertoire - it is as if she is testing just how little she can put in and still come up with a painting. It is a show that confirms the impression that she is one of the most interesting Irish artists at work today, in any medium.
Nancy Wynne-Jones, in Tirawley To Tir na nÓg, offers a personal, lyrical engagement with landscape. The term lyrical is particularly appropriate, because there is a distinctly musical, singing quality to many of her works. Colour is central to her paintings, but she is judicious in the way she uses it. That is, individual paintings are dominated by small families of colour but, more often than not, with a muted tonality. Gesture is the other vital ingredient, delivered with unusual directness, written onto the painting rather than woven into its surface. One painting picks up the theme from the last, and there is a buoyant, enraptured feeling to the show overall.
Light, at Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, combined paintings by Kate MacDonagh and Harry Vince Coulter. The title identified what the work has in common, although both artists also, in different ways, choose to formalise their material, MacDonagh with conspicuously textural grounds and geometrically based compositions, Vince Coulter with freer, more improvisational arrangements. His spacious compositions accommodate horizontal "inserts" that suggest complementary views of an overall image. The pace of his work is fast, with darting movement and brilliant chromatic highlights. MacDonagh's is slower and quieter, almost sculptural.
