Friday sees the launch of the Eigse Carlow Arts Festival 1998 at St Patrick's College, Carlow. Eigse has the reputation of being adventurous in its visual arts programming, in particular bringing exciting artists from abroad including, in past years, John Hoyland, Peter Howson, Barbara Rae and Hughie O'Donoghue. This year is no exception. None of the three artists invited from overseas has exhibited in Ireland before. All are painters who make bold, richly coloured works. They are June Redfern from Scotland, Hans Tyrrestrup from Denmark and David Tress, an Englishman long resident in Pembrokeshire.
The London-born Tress makes landscape-based studies in which the paint is energetically, even violently applied and worked, a manner of making that corresponds to the forces and events that shape and weather the land. He uses the same methods in fine figure studies which, despite the gestural energy, are surprisingly sensitive. His graphic work is also impressive. This way of working follows experiments with conceptualism and performance art as a student.
Redfern paints strange narrative images in which figures haunt a shoreline landscape. Everything is described in broad brushstrokes, with a non-naturalistic palette. There is little or no fine detail and no hint as to the meanings of the fragmentary dramas we glimpse. Seen as a group, the pictures generate an air of mystery, as if we are seeing moments recalled from dreams. Tyrrestrup's work also has a figurative centre. He paints revised versions of Venus in which the armless icon, the Venus de Milo, is reinterpreted in the midst of storms of paintwork.
Several substantial works by Wexford sculptor Michael Warren will form the centrepiece of the main exhibition, including a model for a forthcoming public commission, leading to the theme of next Saturday's open forum discussion on public art with Dick Joynt and others. The other invited Irish artists are painter Robert Armstrong, whose recent work has been inspired by volcanoes, sculptor Sandra Bell who will show small-scale bronzes, and Robert Lynn, whose work has undergone an interesting change in the past couple of years, though it remains rooted in a response to landscape.
This year's solo exhibition by an emerging artist is devoted to the work of Peter FitzGerald. A series of blindfold paintings he made at the Irish Museum of Modern Art attracted a great deal of attention, but more recently he has been painting minus the blindfold, looking at the way the landscape of the west of Ireland has been represented in art.
