Visual Arts: Clement McAleer's show at the Hallward marks a significant return to form on the part of a fine painter who seemed to be slightly out of touch with his own instinctive abilities for a while.
That made all the more difference because McAleer's work is not conceptually oriented, it is very much process driven. It depends on the quality of his engagement with the painting.
This comes through in terms of the liveliness of the finished surface. When it's right, the surface exudes energy, it keeps your eyes and your mind busy, keeps you working in a corresponding process of engagement.
McAleer is a representational painter, and his general subject is landscape, but landscape has always been an armature for him, something to build a painting around, rather than something to be slavishly depicted. And, in a way akin to Cezanne (Provence, appropriately, turns up among other Irish and European locations), his paintings might be described as constructions, built from brush strokes in complex all-over arrangements. That is, they are built not brick by brick, from bottom to top, but organically, as balanced systems. Take away any one component, and the whole thing collapses.
For a time his coastal landscapes seemed more like bottom to top constructions, obviously made with ability but mechanically. They didn't quite spark into life. The colour looked a bit harsh and simplistic. As it happens, there are some similar coastal studies here, but even they are more alert, given a lift by the use of subtle, clever touches. Besides which, McAleer has extended his subject matter and set himself more complicated pictorial problems.
Expanses of railway track, viewed as a series of rhythmic horizontal accents, are a recurrent motif. This geometric patterning is blurred and broken by incidental vegetation. Occasionally rolling stock, buildings and other details are incorporated. McAleer uses these elements to develop the idea of how we read a landscape, putting together bits and pieces of information, figuring out the layers of accident and design. The strong horizontals and the potential passage of trains adds to a sense of mobility and uncertainty.
There is one fine painting that seems to stand alone, but actually suggests similar preoccupations. Dubonnet Wall Provence is as the title says: a picture of a huge, blue painted wall that doubles as the side of a building and an ad for Dubonnet. The blue pigment is further distressed by the strong light and shade of Provence, as well as being interrupted by windows and so on.
McAleer almost matches the extent of the blue wall with the edges of the canvas, almost but not quite, so that we can look at the wall as being like a painting in itself, or one could say as representing the idea of a painting. He relishes the various layers of meaning in the image, but in a relaxed, thoroughly unforced way. It's one of several terrific paintings in a very good show.
Robert Bates, at the Molesworth Gallery, works on an incredibly small scale. Disconcertingly so, if you happen to encounter his work first in the form of illustrations in the show's catalogue. So intricately detailed are his representational images that you tend to assume they must be quite large in reality. In fact they are hardly bigger than the modestly scaled reproductions. They are painstakingly painted in watercolour to a remarkable level of finish.
Bates lives in Kerry and has been in Ireland for 21 years. He has a distinctive, almost idiosyncratic vision, with aspects of the Romantic and the Gothic, with echoes of Casper David Friedrich, for example. He likes dramatic natural lighting effects: bright moonlight, sunsets, sunlight spilling into rocky woodland settings.
There is a storybook quality to some of this, with cabins in the forest, or figures emblematically isolated in huge natural settings, yet Bates always anchors his imagery in a matter-of-fact world and never drifts into sentiment or contrivance.
He lets his pictures have lives of their own by opting not to pin them down in terms of narrative meaning. It's up to us to work out what is going on when we see a woman apparently reading a letter close to an electricity pole on a remote country road.
But Bates is not afraid to acknowledge the exceptional beauty of the landscape: he just doesn't sentimentalise it, and incorporates those electricity poles and rain pools in potholes as well as the range of distant mountains. As an artist he has formidable ability, in other words, and intelligence.
It somehow feels appropriate that Dublin's smallest gallery, the Goethe Institut's The Return, is one of the venues to mark the Beckett centenary. None better to curate it than Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, the author of a comprehensive book on James Joyce's impact on the visual arts. She has sited Space of Doubt, a photographic diptych by Mary McIntyre, against two adjacent walls in The Return. The photographs present us with the image of drawn stage curtains: an empty space, and an obscured space.
Lerm Hayes details the subtlety of her choice when she points out that, when Beckett was much taken by the paintings in German galleries in the 1930s, what he did not see, what had been expressly excluded, was Modernist art. McIntyre's work can be read as a contemporary reworking of German Romanticism, with post-industrial landscapes and settings taking the place of Friedrich's sublime natural vistas. In addition, on Beckett's centenary, April 13th, there will be a screening of Hans Op de Beeck's Determination 4.
Reviewed
Clement McAleer, recent paintings, Hallward Gallery until tomorrow (01-6621482) Robert Bates, watercolours, Molesworth Gallery until tomorrow (01-6791548) Space of Doubt, Mary McIntyre, The Return, Goethe-Institut until April 13 (01-6611155)
