Visual Arts Aidan Dunne Reviewed (I'm Always Touched) By Your Presence, Dear, New acquisitions. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Military Rd, Kilmainham Tues-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun noon-5.30pm Until Nov 11 01-6129900 John Shinnors, New work. Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St Until May 19 01-6766055
Imma has made a significant number of acquisitions over the past few years and (I'm Always Touched) By Your Presence, Dear, marshals some of them.
As the title, drawn from a Blondie lyric, suggests, some thought has been given to production values. It's not just a question of allocating a space to recent purchases and stepping back. Decked out with a startling crimson entrance and boasting a succession of blacked-out rooms to accommodate several video and other projection pieces, the installation is elaborate, and even manages to disguise the constraint of the building's repeat-pattern layout, its succession of rooms opening off a corridor.
A cluster of video projections effectively disorientates us, in a good way. There are separate pieces by two currently fashionable figures who are probably best known for their collaborative projects (together and with others), Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. Both have done much to renegotiate, as it is termed, the nature of the gallery space and the encounter between visitor and artwork. Much of the excitement attendant on what they do, though, diminishes in proportion to immediate, live engagement. Huyghe's Block Party is an example of a contemporary genre, unofficial cultural history, and consists of casual interviews with veterans of early hip hop. It's okay in a laid-back way.
Parreno's high point so far is his feature-length film Zidane, which tracks the French footballer through a match. He made it with Douglas Gordon, and its extraordinary intensity sets a new standard for his work but it is not, as yet, part of Imma's collection. So, judged solely on what we see here by both he and Huyghe, you may wonder why they are so prominent at the moment. Lu Chunsheng's projected work has the giddy energy and enthusiasm of a great deal of contemporary Chinese art, but also its self-indulgence. It's as though the artists are making up for lost time, relishing their freedom.
Willie Doherty's Empty, made last year, charts a disused, dilapidated office block through an uneventful day. It is surprisingly rich, visually, and could be read as a portrait of Northern Ireland, although it was made before the unthinkable, in the form of recent political developments, happened. If Doherty addresses the public, historical sphere, Cecily Brennan looks to the individual psyche in a remarkable video, Melancholia, a work with a fascinating range of painterly reference.
Brennan presents us with a lying, still figure, closed in by a box-like construction. The woman's inward state is visualised in the form of an inky blackness that gradually pervades the sheet on which she is stretched out. It's as though Brennan addresses and combines two pictorial themes, the reclining female nude and the dead Christ - the latter particularly with regard to Mantegna's celebrated painting. As it progresses, the video becomes a statement of the woman's separateness and subjectivity. Poised between casualness and formality, beauty and sadness, it is a well-judged piece.
If the upended parachute is anything to go by, things don't look good for the gannet in Dorothy Cross's installation. It's perpetually caught plummeting seawards, a creature between one world and the next, and the mood is tragic-comic rather than, say, sentimental. It's important that the museum features works by William Scott, and the group of works recently acquired goes some way towards doing the job. It includes two big, impressive abstracts and, intriguingly, a small sculpture from 1955. The Hugh Lane has a room given over to Sean Scully, but Imma continues to add to its holding of work by him with a big, theatrically assertive painting from 1986, Once, which features typically subtle, almost tender paintwork within its bold, architectonic framework. Hughie O'Donoghue's Anatomy of Melancholy I, with its spectral human figure elegantly coiled into the surface, embodied in pigment, looks terrific. Not many people can paint with such authority on this scale.
Gary Coyle's densely patterned charcoal drawings invariably direct our attention to what remains unseen or unstated, hinting at the layers of dark narrative that are implicit in apparently innocuous settings. Belying its small scale, Fergus Feehily's painting is outstanding, a thoughtful and engaging composition, poised and concentrated. Also noteworthy are works by Blaise Drummond, Barry Flanagan, Brian Duggan, Linda Quinlan, Liam O'Callaghan and Tom Hunter. I'm signally untouched, though, by the presence of Mark Manders's idiosyncratic installations. One was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the doubt isn't going away.
JOHN SHINNORS IS something of a phenomenon in the Irish art world. A man of easy-going temperament who paints all-but-abstract pictures inspired by a quirky repertoire of motifs (including cattle, magpies, a lighthouse, washing on clotheslines and scarecrows), pictures that often have the character of visual puzzles, he has become one of the most popular and collectible artists in the country. Clearly people like the conundrums that he creates, even people who might baulk at the idea of abstraction per se.
Shinnors's paintings do have a conversational, engaging quality.
They involve the eye and the mind in a process of interpretation, and they work well as abstract compositions as well. Subtleties of black and white have intrigued him for a long time, but in his latest work, at the Taylor Galleries, he gives us some substantial blasts of intense colour, particularly in a series of pictures based on the building cranes that are a fixture in pretty much every Irish city these days.
Much of his new work, though, is part of another series, English Allotment, which is based on a vegetable allotment glimpsed in passing in the south of England. These works take the idea of the patchwork landscape of the allotment, with its improvised fittings and buildings, and play with its visual ambiguities and uncertainties. The allotment is a perfect subject for Shinnors in this regard, because usually his work conveys a sense of things going on behind the scenes, beyond the assumptions of first impressions.
