Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reviews the latest exhibitions.
Reviewed
Mary-Rose Binchy: Twenty:Twenty, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until April 17th (01-6713414)
Bongi MacDermott, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until April 24th (01- 8740064)
Denis Mamalis: Connemara Dreaming, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until April 16th (01-6621482)
Night and Day, Origin Gallery
Saying no to metric, Mary-Rose Binchy's exhibition Twenty:Twenty at the Green on Red takes its title from the uniform measurement of the paintings: 20 inches by 20 inches. It also refers to 20:20 vision, perhaps hinting at the way painting is about looking and seeing, not only and obviously in terms of representation but also in relation to the processes of its making. That is to say, as a rule painters spend an awful lot of time standing or, more often, sitting looking at marks they've made on canvas.
In his hugely informative memoir of the New York art world, A Sweeper-Up After Artists, (Thames & Hudson), Irving Sandler relates the story of a prominent artist who agreed to be filmed at work. Sandler and his crew got great footage of him labouring away energetically. But when asked a few days later how the painting was going he said he'd junked it immediately they'd gone. Why? Because that wasn't the way he painted. If he'd followed his usual routine they'd have shot hour upon hour of film of him sitting in a chair looking at a work in progress and people would have thought it was some kind of joke.
Certainly in this work Binchy sets about having a long hard look at her own way of making pictures. In general, she works within a framework of abstraction, but her soft-edged, organic forms and atmospheric colours link her paintings to landscape. In the past I've thought her work suffered from not being looked at enough, that the decisions failed to convince. Here she has tightened up her approach, not in a negative, self-conscious sense but in the way the paintings seem more closely argued, more definite.
Often she allows just one boundary shape within the square, that is one form and two colours, recalling Richard Gorman at his most stringent. But where he goes for sustaining a pictorial tension by articulating form as precisely as possible, she instinctively prefers an organic freedom and flexibility, a looser feeling in the surface. The forms and colours still evoke a world beyond the canvas. She refers to the "small secrets" of everyday life as a subject, which is a good way of describing the way a painting is often about something not seen, something we are prompted to look for.
This could be a significant show for her, a moment of careful reappraisal.
Bongi MacDermott's paintings, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, suggest a kind of narrative, following the adventures of a highly mobile baby through a variety of exotic locations. Children, as Freud put it, are the virtuosos of desire, wanting everything. MacDermott has chosen to situate her baby subject against a succession of landscapes of desire.
Previously her hard-edged, incisive work has explored the way the worlds of advertising and reality collide, setting the illusion of the image against the reality of feeling and experience. Here her landscapes are again harvested from advertisements, shorn of their dramas of desire and their aspirational brand names. They are, though, significant sites in themselves, conforming to ideas of exotic, desirable places. With the air of a storybook baby - Maurice Sendak comes to mind - MacDermott's cheerful young protagonist may exemplify an innocent desire, unself-consciously relishing a world that has yet to be symbolically structured and commodified. Yet the work anticipates how the baby will gradually become aware of these hidden structures in the world as it grows up. The pictures are beautifully, sensitively painted, with little of MacDermott's erstwhile acerbic hardness of surface, but they maintain her toughness of attitude.
Dennis Mamalis's paintings in Connemara Dreaming at the Hallward are directly inspired by landscape. But they are also surely inspired by other paintings, notably those of Howard Hodgkin and Sean Sweeney.
Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that both are stylistically highly distinctive artists, and Mamalis has not really figured out how to assimilate them. Rather, and riskily, he has imported some of their stylistic mannerisms.
His own paintings are boldly stated, exuberant and celebratory. They relish bright colour and thick impasto and can look attractive. Apart from their overtly derivative quality, the downside is that they lack subtlety and are poorly resolved, coming across more as apprentice pieces than fully achieved works in their own right.
Catherine O'Leanachain, whose two- person show with Kathleen Furey, Night and Day, has just ended at the Origin Gallery (though some work is still on view there), exhibited some fine, direct responses to the wild shoreline of Bolus Head in Co Kerry. In a series of mixed-media paintings and monoprints she trusted her engagement with the environment and her innate skill to convey the truth of her experience. Her very free handling payed off in some great sea studies and a lovely fluent line, detailing the ancient, rocky landscape, in the monoprints.
A complementary body of work took a more stylised, premeditated approach to the habitation and organisation of the landscape. The same idea was applied to an Arboretum series. These paintings, interesting in themselves, looked as if they might be fragments of a single larger work. Furey's more conventionally decorative compositions were very competent, if not as adventurous.
