Over the past seven years, Eigse Carlow has built up a formidable reputation for introducing artists from abroad to Ireland. Often, and wisely, the festival has looked not to the traditional artistic centres, but to what would have been considered the periphery. This coincides with the dawning awareness in the art world that the old hierarchies are being dismantled, that the regions and not just the capitals merit attention.
Of the three artists invited from abroad for Eigse '98, David Tress is the most obviously accomplished. Though born in London, he lives in Pembrokeshire. He is showing oils, mixed media works on paper and charcoal drawings. All are based on landscape, and the latter, with their fierce, spiky strokes and gouges, bring to mind the sheer attack characteristic of John Virtue's exclusively black-and-white paintings. Tress also enjoys using colour, however.
His oils are built from masses of creamy-textured pigment in which one or two colours predominate. In the mixed media pieces strips of torn, heavy paper accumulate in layers. There are subdued masses of earth colours, but they are usually lifted by, say, a pure red, or green. All in all the experience of Tress's work is not unakin to standing out on the flank of a heather-mantled mountain in the blast of a bitingly fresh north-westerly. If Tress is the most immediately impressive, June Redfern from Scotland is the most intriguing. I'm still not sure if I actually like her paintings but they are striking, audacious and make a great case for themselves. What's striking about them is that at every stage she declines to do the obvious thing.
Briefly, they are figurative works that develop a modest range of narrative concerns and invite symbolic interpretation. Their background is a shoreline landscape inhabited by women, usually in pairs, plus horses, boats and the occasional building. The women often seem to be deep in discussion as they go about mundane tasks. But none of this is described in great detail. Rather, it is indicated in approximate swathes of paint. Sometimes pigment is squeezed from the tube and left almost undisturbed on the surface. And the colours are disconcerting, pushed away from naturalism to acidic sharpness: lemony yellows, astringent blues and greens. Yet Redfern makes surprisingly atmospheric, compelling pictures from these unlikely elements. There is, for example, a strong feeling of engagement between the women in her work, a sense of solidarity.
The Mediterranean palette has unexpectedly found its way into Hans Tyrrestrup's vibrant, zingy paintings, his colours picked up in brightness and intensity, but Northern European expressionist painting is as big an influence on his exuberant compositions as the sunny south. Despite their lively gesturalism, there is an almost leisurely quality to the West Jutlanddweller's paintings. They are agreeable, but not a great deal more.
There are also several invited artists who are either Irish or based in Ireland. Robert Armstrong's smokey, sulphurous compositions relate to volcanoes. He seems drawn to the subject partly because of its inherently painterly qualities: the extreme geophysical process orders the world into pure mineral configurations like the artist ordering it into a group of colours on a palette. And everything is mutable: melting, flowing, floating, drifting, falling, coalescing. All become elements of a visual grammar in subtle, imposing paintings.
As well as a group of elegant wood sculptures, Michael Warren shows a model for a major land art project, Tulach a'tSolais, currently in the making. It commemorates the 1798 rebellion but is something more as well. Sited at Oulart in Co Wexford, it will consist of a great, grassed mound of earth, split by a narrow corridor giving access to a central chamber, and aligned with Vinegar Hill. The date of the battle there was June 21st, which is when the central chamber should achieve maximum illumination. It's a huge undertaking and it should be a fine monument.
Bob Lynn, Scottish by birth, resident in Wicklow, shows a range of abstractions based on landscape and fragmentary views of moored boats. He makes strongly structured compositions based on clearly defined areas of colour, and plays around with the point at which a representational image becomes an abstract image, in a way that is broadly comparable to the work of John Shinnors.
The other invited artists are two sculptors, Eileen MacDonagh, a very good "public" artist, whose Famine Stone is sited in the grounds of St Patrick's, and Sandra Bell, whose decorative pieces relish the effects of patina and polish.
Of the two featured emerging artists, Peter Fitzgerald shows a selection of his blindfold paintings. This series, in the making of which Fitzgerald donned a blindfold, mixed and applied colours or drew while an observer issued instructions about the subject, seems remarkably like an experiment in the psychology of perception and hand-eye co-ordination. And sure enough, he does hold a degree in experimental psychology. The comparative Connemara landscape studies prove he sees better without the blindfold, but the jittery, broken surfaces of the blindfold works also have something.
Eigse's visual arts programme is a remarkable organisational feat, particularly given that it is effected largely on a co-operative basis without the usual curatorial infrastructure behind it. But then Paddy McGovern and his team have clearly learned year by year. St Patrick's College makes a good, extremely spacious venue, but it doesn't obviate the need for a permanent cultural base in the town, and it looks as if that is on the cards. The festival has certainly made the case for it, not least in economic terms.
Eigse Carlow exhibitions continue until Sunday
