Invited last November to make an exhibition for the Hugh Lane Gallery, Sean Shanahan came to the conclusion that the show should take the form of a group of paintings made specifically for the first floor suite of galleries in Charlemont House, a sequence of handsome 18th-century rooms.
That was the beginning of a process that culminates in his exhibition, Vidar, which opens at the Hugh Lane Gallery today.
He is known for making exceptionally spare, laconic abstract paintings. Over the last few years they have taken the form of flat, monochrome expanses, works that maintain a certain neutrality, that are neither intimidating nor ingratiating.
Yet despite their undoubted formal rigour, they are surprisingly accommodating of the viewer, and they are also unusually alert to their surroundings. This not only in the sense that they are comfortably at home in the preserve of the gallery's white cube, but also in the way they seem warily attuned to the fact of their eventual architectural setting, where and whatever it might be. They are interested, that is to say, in negotiating their place in the world.
At its most immediate, this means that they always, as one observer put it, "measure up in the process of creation with their primary space: the wall on which they hang". When they are photographed, Shanahan prefers that they are seen against the surrounding wall, not isolated as though existing in a vacuum. His paintings are never framed, but then, as he says, "the room the painting is in is the frame". It was logical that he should at some stage make a body of work that enters into a more intense dialogue than usual with its surroundings, and his exhibition, Marrano, at the Oratorio di Santa Maria Immacolata at Canelli at San Giorgio Scarampi in Italy, in November 2000, did just that, consisting of just four monochrome paintings in a beautiful, naturally lit setting.
Now, with Vidar, he has done something similar on a larger scale in Dublin. Although based in Italy, he was born in Dublin in 1960. The family moved to England and he studied art in London and Madrid. Without initially planning it that way, he has lived and worked in Italy for the past 14 years, for the most part in Sartirana, latterly in Montevecchia, both small villages north of Milan.
He exhibits widely in Europe, with the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin and with the Fenderesky in Belfast. His work has progressed - one is tempted to say inexorably - towards greater and greater simplification of form, all the time conveying the sure message that it is hard to make a simple painting. You might be tempted to describe it as reductionist, but Shanahan himself says: "I prefer the word condensed. Reduction implies that things are taken out, but what could I take out? You know the joke? All my life I gave you nothing and still you ask for more."
Marrano marked a departure in that he used titles for the show and the individual paintings, something he continues with Vidar.
Previously he'd avoided titles. Asked about this, he responds in a typically pragmatic fashion. "I was making an archive of my work and I got fed up with listing Untitled after Untitled . . ." In the early stages, the titles and pattern of the exhibition were inspired by, or drawn from, Joseph Conrad's book, The Shadow Line.
"Vidar is a ship on which Conrad served," he says. "That was part of the experiences on which he later based the book. I was thinking in terms of finding some way to draw a viewer through the four rooms, and I thought, well, the paintings won't be able to do that on their own. So there is this idea of a narrative, a journey or voyage, and a point of transition. But that's not to say the paintings are about Conrad. They're not. It's a way of coaxing you into seeing them."
Oddly enough, though, The Shadow Line is a book that seems to hold a particular fascination for artists. Charles Tyrrell used the title for his RHA exhibition a couple of years ago. The themes of ageing, of an awareness of mortality, of crossing an invisible but irrevocable line in life, have perhaps something to do with this fascination. In fact two of the Vidar paintings are titled, rather bluntly, You're Dead.
"What's important is that the viewer is aware of the fact that they are standing in front of the painting," Shanahan says. "That it places you there. My sentiments do not know that I am mortal. But good art has something about it that brings home our own mortality. The better the art, the more exposed you are to that realisation."
Yet it is true that the paintings are not "about" Conrad or the book. "I think it was the Dutch artist, Geer Van Velde, who, when he was asked about titles, said a painting has a title until it's dry. Once it's dry it doesn't need it any more; it's on its own. Having said that, there's nothing definitive or final about the finished painting. I'm not interested in making definitive paintings that are 'relevant'. I want my painting to be undogmatic and non- conclusive," Shanahan says.
The "ensemble of paintings" that make up Vidar come in several shapes and sizes, including some dramatically narrow vertical oblongs and - for Shanahan - a fairly large landscape-format piece. Whereas his last show at the Kerlin Gallery was exclusively blue, this work relishes a diversity of often intense and ravishing colour. Each painted MDF panel is bounded by two unpainted margins - "The edges," he explains, "hold you on the surface."
The surfaces themselves are unglazed and hence, despite their impassivity, oddly vulnerable, another characteristic feature of his work.
Piece for piece, the paintings are beautiful (some spectacularly so), as is the overall installation. But it is true that, given that each panel offers the viewer only an expanse of a single colour to consider, and that the work is sparely arranged throughout the sequence of rooms, it is likely that some visitors will come in, breeze through and exit perplexed by the whole thing or, more likely, irritated.
Those who are sceptically predisposed would probably scoff at the notion that Shanahan spends a great deal of time over every aspect of what they see - the size, colour and format of each individual work, the inter-relationships between works, and between works and spaces. But the more time you spend at the show, the more you look, feel and think your way into it, the more you are likely to appreciate this.
To some extent, as well, the work is armoured against such a response. It is not trying to sell you anything. There is an almost defensive aspect to it, in the way that Sean Scully has spoken of his paintings, those made during his first years in Manhattan, as being defensive, wary. Shanahan's paintings insist on keeping their own counsel.
"There is," he agrees, "a sense in which people don't find these paintings. You have to go looking for them. I think that a painting should command the room. It should maintain its autonomy regardless of context.
"But that has to do with a quality of self- containment. I don't mean a painting should be strident. It should give you the respect you deserve."
How much respect does a viewer deserve? "What I mean by that is that, as a painter, you have to operate at your own limits, which means you never pretend, you don't underestimate the viewer, you don't presume that you can make something predetermined that you know they will like or approve of. I want people to engage with the things I make. I know from my own experience that sometimes that engagement is only apparent later.
"There's this description in Conrad of a character moving through a street in intense light and heat, but he only realises it when it stops, when he is out of it. Sometimes looking at art is like that."
When we look at paintings, Shanahan argues, we are looking for "a moment of fleeting understanding", but the thing that draws you back again and again "is the feeling that you haven't quite grasped what is in front of you. There are times when you look at a painting and it's as if it's saying: 'I'm not showing you all the colour you might think . . . there is more to be seen."
That is certainly true of his colour. He is predisposed towards slightly indeterminate colours, colours that have what he calls an "in-between-ness", such as the grey of Pearl, which positively shimmers, or another work in which the main constituent is Chinese vermilion, an intensely hot colour with a distinctly cool undertone.
"When I want to make a painting, if I could do it in two minutes I would, if I could do them differently I would - I go in for as little painterly fetishism as possible," Shanahan says. "But you never know. It comes back to painting being a non-conclusive activity, which is partly why it's interesting.
"You're constantly reassessing your position in front of it. There's never any foreclosure for me."
He makes very small paintings and moderately large paintings - never very large. But "I really don't make any distinction between small and large paintings. It's like you're in this sea of painting, and you cup your hand and dip it in. You have the sea, and you have what you hold in your palm, but it's all the sea".
Vidar is at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Charlemont House, Parnell Square, Dublin until December 8th (tel: 01-8741903).
