Reviewed: David Mach and Francisco Toledo, Advance Factory, Loughboy; Tony Cragg, Butler Gallery; Nick Miller and Trevor Edmands, Grennan Mill, Thomastown; Sculpture at Kells, Kells Priory Karin Muhlert, Rudolf Heltzel Gallery; Suzanna Crampton, Kilkenny County Hall, John's St; Helena Gorey, Butler House
The man emerged from the Advance Factory at Loughboy, having given the work of David Mach and Francisco Toledo a very quick once-over. He was beaming, he looked really happy. So he liked it then? No. "Worse than last year," he said, grinning broadly. "If that's possible." He was happy because his prejudices had been confirmed, modern art was indeed rubbish and all was right with the world.
Is it the kind of response that the Festival organisers should worry about? Not really. The fact is that people were turning up at the Advance Factory in droves to see what all the fuss was about and, frankly, unless your mind is hermetically sealed against engagement, Mach's work is eminently approachable and hugely enjoyable. Notwithstanding the ongoing debate about the shift in the relative status of classical music in the Festival, it has to be said that over the last couple of years the visual arts programme has gone from strength to strength, greatly helped by associated shows in the Butler Gallery and Sculpture at Kells.
This year, apart from the main shows, the city and its surroundings are awash with exhibitions of every shape and form.
That two of the artists, Mach and Tony Cragg, showing separately, were among those responsible for the renaissance of British sculpture in the 1980s looks suspiciously like effective co-ordination. Add to them the display of several major works by a British sculptor of an earlier generation, Lynn Chadwick, at Kells, and it looks as if we're dealing with something seriously impressive.
The Butler Gallery's Cragg show, far from being just something shipped over in a crate, marks a serious addition to the output of one of the world's leading sculptors, thanks chiefly to Cragg's extraordinary level of commitment to the project. This is evident in the collaborative involvement of several Kilkenny craft-workers in the creation of new pieces, including stonemason Philip Harding, who worked limestone from the local Feelystone quarry, potter Nicholas Mosse and glass-blower Keith Ledbetter.
Cragg is notably wary about efforts to paraphrase what his work is about. Whether he employs immediately recognisable forms, in composite arrangements that make them yield up new meanings, like the myriad containers that comprise his compelling, stratified Eroded Landscape, or develops oddly biomorphic, familiar-seeming though novel forms, he seems to be engaging in a kind of equivalent to natural history.
But he applies its scientific methods to his immediate cultural landscape in the widest sense, with its full range of complex interrelationships. Hence, though his work is in a way abstract and self-contained, it actually possess numerous points of entry to and exit from, of contact with and correspondence to the world. Incidentally, Swedish-born, Scotland-based Karin Muhlert's beautiful paper sculptures, at the Rudolf Heltzel Gallery, form a good counterpoint to Cragg's work.
You can ponder the multiple, Ozymandian ironies of Mach's Built to Last, as you stroll between its four imposingly massive columns built from newsprint. Wander into his wonderful Trophy Room, a facsimile wood-panelled gentleman's club billiard room, complete with stuffed animal heads on the wall. It is part art world allegory, and part consumer culture allegory, with the animals gripping trophies of another sort, consumer durables, from a fridge, to an exercise machine, to a grand piano. This altogether real but clearly impossible place exemplifies Mach's ambitious, heroically uncompromising approach and should be required viewing for all art students contemplating making installations.
At Kells, Chadwick's huge, regal Sitting Couple, high on the southern bank of the King's River, dominate the scene. Chadwick's spiky figures, human and animal, are everywhere, and with their formal, venerable air, fit very well amid the labyrinthine walls of the priory. This year's show is particularly good, with architectonic pieces by Maurice McDonagh and Nicos Nicolaou that take on the scale and nature of the setting very well.
Clodagh Emoe's Ghostbirds also colonise the space brilliantly, and there is a notably sensitive piece by Robert Frazier. Brian Duggan, Yvonne McGuinness (also exhibiting at the railway station in Kilkenny) and Mark Cullen effectively strike a bolder note, and Gerard Cox's roughhewn wood pieces and Mike Duhan's swimmers mark the approaches.
Inside the large mill on the river, there's also a small retrospective devoted to the work of Oisin Kelly. This is a lovely show that includes a large number of personal pieces, quite removed from Kelly's more formal public work, and often based on family and friends. The quality of intimacy in the work is enhanced by the setting. And don't miss Brian Connolly's Water Table close to the weir.
Last year, Grennan Mill in Thomastown emerged as an outstanding venue and this time it features Nick Miller's hypnotic portrait drawing on the top floor. Their strange immediacy was achieved by a unique modus ope-randi: the subject lies on the floor while the artist leans over, just inches away. If this sounds touchy-feely it is not quite. There is a ruthless aspect to Miller's pursuit of authentic human presence that lends the finished pieces an almost frightening intensity, underlined by his accompanying series of dissection-room studies.
He shares the mill with English artist Trevor Edmands, whose show is the first in a projected series whereby an art world figure introduces the work of an artist who greatly influenced them. Hughie O'Donoghue chose Edmands, and the connection is not immediately obvious. Edmands is one of those individuals who stands apart from the mainstream. There is a visionary directness and honesty to his work, which encompasses painting, sculpture and writing. It centres on the individual human figure, is steeped in a sense - and knowledge - of art history, and its sometimes almost religious air seems related more to a spiritual than religious quality as such. It is rewarding and thoughtful work, unfailingly attentive to Edmands' rich inner world.
The Mexican graphic artist Toledo, at the Advance Factory, also describes an inner world. He is a fluent draughtsman who unfolds a stream-of-consciousness series of fable-like images, featuring a vast menagerie of fantastic creatures, with dark imaginative exuberance. A skeletal figure of death plus all manner of anthropomorphised animals inhabit a cruel, macabre, feverish, sexualised realm. Toledo is a well-versed, virtuoso performer.
At the County Hall, Suzanna Crampton's photographic show Fauna employs a striking technical process, "reverse-processing", to come up with novel accounts of a hackneyed theme: images of animals. It's as though her images are half-negative, half-positive. The result is not only very painterly, with some strikingly unexpected colour effects, but also allows us to see the animals, from barnyard hens to exotic zoo specimens, in a different light, sidestepping any tendency towards sentimentality.
At Butler House, Helena Gorey's beautifully understated paintings refer in the most oblique way to a journey across the north-western United States. What they do is distil the atmospheric essence of a particular experience of place into a certain colour temperature and texture, and they have a persuasive, mediative presence. It's also worth noting the Castle gate sculptures by Sarturio Alonso and Derek Whitticase, and Patricia McKenna's show at the outlying festival venue of the upperwood Stableyard in Freshford.