Remember Jim Kemmy: contemporary juxtapositions should be a popular exhibition, not just because Jim Kemmy was a popular man and people will turn out for that reason, but also because it involves a lively dialogue between old and new that many will find more approachable than the intimidating monolith called Modern Art.
The dialogue takes the form of 20 artists choosing a work each from the City Gallery's permanent collection, making a work of their own in response or relationship to it, and exhibiting the works side by side. Like politics, this prescription results in some unlikely bedfellows: Jack B. Yeats and Sam Walsh, Charles Lamb and Fiona Bourke, Mainie Jellett and Sean Taylor.
In a series of analytical drawings, Walsh systematically deconstructs the composition of Yeats's painting Chairoplanes, "virtually the opposite of my own interests", as he says himself, a freely brushed fun-fair scene full of giddy centrifugal energy. In Michael Collins's painting, inspired by the same Yeats, Jim Kemmy, pictured suspended over the Shannon, looks as if he has just flown out of one of the whirling chairoplanes.
Some of the best juxtapositions involve landscapes. Charles Harper responds to a fine moody, tonal view of Powerscourt Waterfall by George Barrett with a bright, highly-coloured idealised landscape: a terrific pictorial contrast.
Deirdre O'Mahony's thoughtful reworking of Richard Carver's non-specific landscape looks like a study of frozen ground but still has great sense of space to it. Paul O'Reilly's meticulous copy of Catherine O'Brien's dockland study amplifies the colour and tonal range of the original and encourages us to look at the nuts and bolts of how the painting is put together.
John Shinnors's choice of St George Hare's virtuoso study of herring on a marble slab acknowledges its influence on his own work, though his painted response is untypical and a little uneasy. Daniel O'Connell looks bored and long-suffering in Joseph Patrick Haverty's stilted portrait. It's good to see outstanding works like Patrick Collins's painting of a swan taking flight, Nano Reid's Ancient Land, a strong Camille Souter, an excellent little Nathanial Hone of a headland at Bundoran on a windy day, and a very nice, anonymous study of the old Thomond Bridge, the glassy clarity of which is well-counterpointed by Tom Fitzgerald's glass and mixed media plan for a bridge. This is the first in an annual series of exhibitions. Perhaps next time the initiative will be more with the new than the old.
There is another substantial show at the City Gallery, Do Time, devoted to several years' work by Dutch artist Tjibbe Hooghiemstra. His Frisian background may partly explain his interest in Ireland. The Kerlin has previously exhibited his Tory Island drawings, many of which are in the present show. The title derives from his involvement in the teaching project at Portlaoise prison, and references to counting the years and other literal details recur in his images.
HOOGHIEMSTRA is very much of the less-is-more, understated school exemplified by Luc Tuymans, though in his own distinctive way. If you saw one of his drawings lying on a table you could be forgiven for thinking someone had been doodling while chatting on the phone or killing time. He likes paper with a past, and works on the reverse of old prints or musical scores. Conservators would certainly frown at his use of foxed, deteriorated material like this, but it is relevant for his purpose. What the work conveys is a quiet, attentive sensibility and the layering of time. For example, he views landscape not in a conventional pictorial way but as a fragmentary composite of the marks made by the many generations who have lived on it. His work is almost obtuse in its wilful obliqueness, but it gains on each repeated viewing and many of the drawings are quite beautiful.
David Timmons was a deserving winner of this year's Victor Treacy Award, though all the artists at this Butler Gallery show deserve credit for a show that marks a significant development in the award's history so far. Each of them has a room of the Butler to play with, in effect a small oneperson show each, and they make the most of it, which is to say most of them take chances and decline the soft option.
In the event, things don't quite work out for Caroline McCarthy and Niamh Lawlor, but in each case there is enough there to make you look forward to what they do in future. Lawlor's installation, with a stunning glass full-body cast as its centrepiece, becomes too complicated for its own good. Less would have been more. McCarthy's installation, by contrast, is understated and doesn't quite achieve the atmosphere it's aiming for. Vanessa O'Reilly's work is very interesting. A group of photographs of parkland are arranged on the wall according to no discernible logic, though they have a vaguely forensic look about them, as though they are scene-of-crime records. A sheet of glass leans casually against the wall in front of them. On a video monitor, we see a static view of the parkland stretching away from Kilkenny Castle, with people wandering across.
By accident or design, this is essentially a re-working - one of many such - of the renowned sequence from Antonioni's film Blow-Up. In the film, the photographer protagonist makes a series of enlargements of innocuous looking images of a deserted park to ascertain whether he has accidentally captured evidence of a killing in progress. O'Reilly's work has a comparable air of vague, potential menace, given an edge by that precarious sheet of glass.
Eoin Llewelyn, a painter evidently influenced by Anselm Kiefer, shows some large-scale compositions that explore the tensions between highly textured, gestural treatment and photographic representation. But re-doing an already highly pictorial and well-known photographic image is not necessarily the best way to go. Timmons has made impressive work based on items of wall furniture we take for granted, those anonymous casings housing various appliances. His versions, complete with air vents, were flawlessly finished in Lada car colours.
His new work is similar although less referential, and comes with long allegorical titles. Flawless, smooth, symmetrical objects present us with impassive surfaces. They are striking works that look as if, to paraphrase the ad, they have been hand-built by robots.
