As if by way of consolation for a disappointing summer, the RHA has programmed a holiday into its exhibitions schedule. The Holiday Show, which currently occupies galleries two and three, doesn't offer bargain weekends for two in Palermo or feature promotional displays by the Slovenian tourist authority. It's about something more elusive and intangible than the actual, often tedious business of going on holiday, and that is "the holiday moment or the holiday frame of mind". So it is described by the show's curator, artist William McKeown.
The holiday moment is "expansive, optimistic, positive and happy". As McKeown elaborates, it has to do with more than holidays per se. He has in mind those moments when everything seems to click into place, when it's all mysteriously okay.
But, "when you become aware of this moment, or of self, it's over". Bearing all this in mind, he selected seven artists, whose work he feels encapsulates something of these qualities, to exhibit. He had another criterion: he wanted to devise a show of paintings that were "not essentially about painting". McKeown's own work certainly fits the bill. He established his reputation as a maker of exceptionally spare, monochrome paintings and watercolours, notable for their impeccable surfaces. While you could look at these and tag them as abstract and minimalist, he was consistently at pains to point out that his work was not formalist, not exclusively or predominantly about itself. This point was underlined when he incorporated a series of drawings of plants in a show at the Douglas Hyde. Then the Forever Paintings in his recent solo show at the Kerlin Gallery, while as spare and clear as his earlier work, were unmistakably representations of, or at any rate inspired by, the sky.
Which is what he shows here: an intense blue expanse with tonal gradations - a clear blue summer sky. The representational aspect isn't pushed. He is as keen on editing out distractions as ever. What seems to count for him is the act of opening out that expanse, and the achievement of a high level of intensity. His sense of what he dubs "open" art, that is "expanding, positive and life enhancing" is linked to the establishment of not so much a space as a field. In the language of particle physics, gauge fields carry or embody global symmetries. Analogously, the openness McKeown refers to runs through his paintings, and is implicit throughout them. They are like emotional gauge fields.
In his own work and that of the artists he invited, he wanted images of personal significance but not sentimental nostalgia, rather a quality of detachment. In other words, the paintings of Maureen Gallace from Connecticut. Her attractive, pared-down images of holiday homes in winter and summer, in snow or sand, could in other hands be mushy and sentimental, but are delivered with a rigour and astringency that makes them oddly cool and abstract - like Morandi or Edward Hopper.
There is something toy-like and vaguely unsettling about her clean-cut buildings and domesticated landscapes. People do not feature, leaving all the more room for us.
Stuart Part also paints holiday homes, in the form of caravans and tents, with a taxonomist's eye. Like several of the other painters in the show, his pictures have a deadpan air about them - and a certain technical awkwardness. He doesn't try to gloss over his technical limitations, he just works very effectively within them, and the same goes for Isabel Nolan and Andrew Vickery. The latter paints standard sights in Venice, a city that comes with a magical, mythic status all of its own, but he does so in that flat, deadpan manner, which actually imbues what might otherwise be hackneyed material with freshness.
The holiday in Nolan's work takes the form of a holiday from conscious life in the form of sleep, and in a series of images, mostly small, intimate portraits, she creates a night-time world of restful, restorative slumber. Again, there is an honest directness to her images. Gavin O'Curry paints a series of small, postcard-like views of Dublin, several of which have the effect of estranging the city from us, making it look like an unfamiliar place, an elsewhere.
Anne Ryan's paintings are sketchy vignettes based on the generic world of film westerns, a familiar, consciously unreal but surely appealing place of ranches and saloons, cowboys and badlands, all bathed in the warm glow of retrospection. It's a nice idea. She keeps it deliberately vague, but in this case the technical limitations are a liability.
Perhaps film is also an influence on Darragh Hogan, who creates something like an open-ended narrative with his atmospheric evocations of moody places. They are plausible destinations but not your typical resorts, more woodland and cabin territory, misty shorelines and national parks, quite American in feeling and reminiscent of Ed Ruscha and - admittedly a Canadian - Peter Doig.
Once you see where McKeown is coming from, it's easy to think of other artists he might have included, starting in just the next room, where Oliver Comerford's melancholy paintings in Eurojet Futures recall road movies and transience.
There are a lot of images in the exhibition, plenty to look at, and they reinforce the central idea without being insistent about it - holidays are a state of mind.
The Holiday Show, RHA Galleries II and III, until September 29th (01- 6612558)
