A swirl of Mexico

On holiday in Mexico some years ago, the incoming chairman of the Arts Council, Patrick J. Murphy, a knowledgeable and avid collector of Irish art, visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City. He was surprised to find there a work by a living Irish artist he had never heard of, Philip Kelly. Back in Ireland, he happened to mention this one day on Mike Murphy's arts show. This being Ireland, his remarks were duly noted by the artist's mother and passed on to her son, a chain of events that led to Kelly's first show here in 1997 and, indeed, its sequel, his current exhibition at the Frederick Gallery.

Kelly, a compact, ebullient man with an easy grin and a relaxed manner, doesn't make the trip over here very often. It is, he points out, a 10-hour-plus marathon by air, a fairly gruelling experience for him, his wife Ruth, who is Mexican, and their two young children. "When we travel, we all travel together, Ruth feels very strongly about that." His last visit was to paint murals at Rick Stein's seafood restaurant in Cornwall last year. Ruth takes a dim view of London, but finds Ireland as warm as Mexico, emotionally if not climatically. She has vast administrative experience and handles the organisational aspects of his affairs. "She does everything. I just couldn't do it without her."

They live in the thick of Mexico City. "I thought if I was going to be an urban painter, why not go for the most extreme urban experience there is," he says. Living among 25 million people in a vast, sprawling metropolis certainly counts as concentrated urban experience. Their house is a 20-minute walk from the studio, via freeways and flyovers, hustle and bustle, the "countless accidents of the everyday," that feed directly into his work.

His paintings record a sustained engagement with the fabric of city life, plus occasional excursions further afield, such as visits to the beach at Cancun, or a trip to Oaxaca - a trip that produced some of the best work in the show. But generally it is the pulse of the city, with its endless dramas, its huge energies and incidental felicities, that informs his images. He prefers to negotiate it on foot.

"It's easier to walk. If the smog is bad, you're not allowed drive anyway. If you do drive there'll be a demonstration or some other delay." Although it sounds chaotic, he clearly loves it. "It's a kind of functioning chaos. It can seem as if the whole thing must grind to a halt, but in the end everything works, somehow it all comes together." He picks up on the celebratory element of Mexican culture, with its heightened awareness of life and death. "You constantly get this tremendous sense of vitality."

His style is flexible, spontaneous, improvisational, like the jazz he listens to as he works. In fact, music is indispensable. "I can make art without colours, without canvas, without paper, but not without the music. If I wasn't a painter I'd love to have been a musician. For years I used to hang around with musicians, never painters." His passion for music accounts in part for his itinerary during earlier travels, which took him throughout Europe and to Chicago and New York.

It was Mexico, however, that freed his painting. "I didn't have any money. I could paint whatever I liked and I didn't care what anyone thought. That gave me confidence." He moves effortlessly from landscape studies, built from improbably thick heaps of pigment, to spare, flat, linear compositions, from bursts of pyro-technical, vivid colour to muted, tonal meditations, from relatively straight representation to abstracted, stylised pictographs. His stylistic diversity is underpinned by a consistent sense of rhythmic energy. His great fear is that he might end up painting the same picture over and over again. "I hate to arrive in the studio in the morning and do the same thing I did yesterday. I have to do something different."

The interiors of bars or restaurants are recurrent images, usually with vacant tables. In work as in life, he is obviously drawn to the social pleasures of eating, drinking and talking, but why the empty tables? "If you arrange to meet someone in a bar they'll usually be late, because it's impossible to be on time in Mexico." He sketches the vacant table much as he used to sketch the performers when he worked as a film extra: "It was a great job for an artist. It's like having all these models who keep going through the same routine for you over and over as you draw."

Before Ireland had official diplomatic representation in Mexico, Kelly found himself playing the role of unofficial ambassador, largely thanks, he notes, to the Mexican ambassador to Ireland, Daniel Dultzin, who pointed all Irish visitors in his direction. They included the President, Mrs McAleese, Seamus Heaney, Sile de Valera, Robert Ballagh, Rodney Rice and the painter Philippa Bayliss, who is currently exhibiting at the Origin Gallery in Dublin. The exceptional cultural traffic between Ireland and Mexico owes much to the extraordinary personal interest of Daniel Dultzin, the cultural counsellor, Bruce Swansey and the Belfast-based Mexican artist Alfonso Lopez Montreal, who initiated an Irish-Mexican exchange programme in 1980.

Originally, Kelly arrived in Mexico City in 1983 with $50 in his pocket and without a word of Spanish. "But something . . . it was like putting on a jacket that fits you perfectly, or settling into a chair that is incredibly comfortable, it just felt right." Within a day he had work as an English teacher and somewhere to live. "Actually it was terrible. Up at five, a cold shower, hiking all over the city to get to classes, desperately trying to fit in a little painting." But he persevered and things improved. Then, in 1985, he happened to be out of town when a great earthquake devastated the city. His girlfriend was killed, all his work was destroyed and he returned to Europe.

After Mexico, however, Europe was a grey place, and he was eventually drawn back, in 1989, and has stayed there since. It's one thing to exhibit in another country as an international art star. But when Kelly settled in Mexico he was unknown, and generally speaking it is much rarer to be accepted as an unknown artist. Yet that is what happened to him there. "They have a relaxed attitude to it," he explains.

Meaning they are not hung up on CVs and are willing to trust their own judgment. He knew he had arrived when, in 1996, he was honoured with an exhibition in Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art, a show that was generously and enthusiastically received. While acceptance must be gratifying, his feeling for Mexico has to do with more than that. He is genuinely at home there. "Somehow, in Mexico you feel you're in touch with the essence of life."

Phil Kelly's work is on view at the Frederick Gallery, 24 South Frederick Street, until March 10th