Arts: Eithne Jordan paints rural scenes in the south of France, but focuses on building sites, cars and flyovers, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Eithne Jordan's Peripheral Landscapes at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast are just that: oblique views of a workaday rural environment in the South of France, a would-be pastoral landscape compromised by the random apparatus of modernity: roads, concrete embankments, flyovers, cars, traffic signs, building sites, new houses. There are also intact pastoral elements, however, notably passages of lush vegetation and ancient rutted trails that point to long habitation. And most of the images are bathed in the soft, pink light of early morning or evening, lending a mellowness even to the hard edges of concrete and metal.
For much of each of the last 14 years or so, Jordan has been based in France, living and working in a small village close to Montpelier in Languedoc in the South. It's a place with formidable artistic associations, a landscape that has been painted by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and she has remarked in the past that their presence is palpable there, in the way you can see their work reflected in the light, colours and textures of the landscape.
Previously she has painted aspects of it herself, but not as in her current work. Having made pictures of interiors and figures in interiors, and gardens, during the late 1990s she moved outwards and made expansive, sweeping, Poussinesque studies of the wider countryside. Following this she closed things in again with a series of low-key still lifes, then views of exceptionally drab, functional spaces: corners of warehouses and factory yards, blank, grey spaces.
There was something self-consciously impoverished about these two latter bodies of work but, oddly enough, it's possible to see in them the genesis of her considerably richer Peripheral Landscapes. The concrete yards were essentially buildings as still life, and she is quick to point out that this new work, too, is "in a way closer to the still lifes than to the earlier landscapes. I think the approach came out of still life, the way of looking at the forms." The forms, whether of massed concrete, houses, boundary walls or trees, are simplified and have an easy compositional poise. Jordan mentions two changes in her working methods that led to decisive changes in the work itself. "For the first time, I used gesso on paper for the smaller studies. I turned to gesso because I was wasn't happy with the way I was using oil for this work." The result, immediately evident, is a greater clarity and sharpness. "But then I think the way I was using gesso affected the way I painted in oil." In the past she has tended to work wet-on-wet in oil, to a pronounced degree. "The painting contained the history of changes and decisions made as it went along." Surfaces could be quite murky and muddied - not a bad thing, but a distinctive characteristic of her style. "I realised that if I wanted sharper forms that wouldn't work, I'd have to get it right first time - which I didn't always do, of course." Another change is that she started using a digital camera. "Most of these paintings started from photographs. Buying a digital camera was a real catalyst. For me it's closer to painting in some strange way."
She always carries the camera with her. "It's not that I particularly go hunting for images, it's just that I have the camera there when I see something that interests me. It's like keeping a diary. But I'm surprised at how much it's changed my approach." The landscape is very much her local landscape. As she depicts it, it is quite beautiful, though not in an orthodox way. There is, as she notes, "a contrast between the more brutish, imposed forms and the pastoral." Sometimes this is quite dramatic. More than once she frames a piece of lush countryside through the blank walls of an underpass: nature framed by culture. "Even the new houses, it seems to me, are kind of plonked there in the landscape. They don't exactly fit."
She is careful not to make a moral judgement about the clash. "I see myself looking at what's there, because it's there. I'm looking at these very simple forms and how they interrupt the landscape, what they do to it, but I'm not saying it's a bad or a good thing." More, the hybridised landscape has a particular character that appeals to her. "I do actually like it. Also, painting has to do with transforming the way you look at things. There's one house that I've used and, in reality, it is actually quite ugly, it's an eyesore. But it occurred to me one day that if you see it in a particular way, it becomes interesting." There are a couple of cars, and a van, in the paintings, but no people as such. Jordan smiles wryly. "I kept them out. Actually I think the cars are like people in a way. But I didn't want people as such. I see the houses and the underpasses as being strange monuments in the landscape. They imply the human presence."
Her preference for morning or evening light has a bearing on the way she visualises the architecture as monumental. "It enhances that sculpted quality." Although several paintings unmistakably convey the scorching heat of midday, throughout her time in France she has tended to prefer morning and evening. "I've come to terms with the landscape, but never quite with the light. It's funny, the light is intense, but you don't really get bright colours. The intensity of the sunlight drains them and everything looks bleached. It's hard to work with."
It has been said that she brought her Irish palette to France, but she doesn't see it that way. "I don't see Ireland as being a soft and misty and muted place, the way it's normally presented in terms of Irish landscape painting. I've always felt that there's an incredibly intense light here, and also incredibly intense colour. It always hits me when I come back. You know? That green that almost hurts your eyes."
• Peripheral Landscapes by Eithne Jordan can be seen as part of New Paintings at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast until July 10th (tel: 048-90321402)