A view from the island

By borrowing the title of an Umberto Eco novel for her current exhibition, Diana Copperwhite frames her work as a mixture of assertion, speculation, memory and reverie

DIANA COPPERWHITE'S first solo show was at Temple Bar Gallery in 1994, the year of her graduation from NCAD (she later went on to complete an MA in Barcelona). It was clear that she was an accomplished and ambitious painter with a distinctive, lyrical colour sense and an ability to make bold architectonic compositions bristling with life and energy. The same is true of her work today, as you can see in her current exhibition An Island from the Day Beforeat the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

In the intervening years, the wider nature of her concerns has become more evident. Even in her early work, as she set about describing built, interior spaces, there was an extraordinary restlessness to the images.

We were never allowed to settle into the comfort of a simple, perspective view of a represented space. In retrospect, it's reasonable to suggest that the paintings were more about the instability and complications of seeing than they were about the things seen. The idea of seeing and not seeing, and the use of partial, layered and composite images run through more or less everything she's done. When she's titled her exhibitions she usually refers to questions of visibility and perception: Midnightin 2005, In a Certain Lightin 2006, and BLIND SPOTin 2007. Flat Earth,her project for Madrid's ARCO the same year, alludes to a dogmatic insistence on literal appearances. And now, An Island from the Day Beforetakes its title from a 1994 novel by Umberto Eco.

The book centres on a protagonist who finds himself in an odd predicament, one that confers on him a strange point of view. The reader is left wondering what is true in an inextricable mixture of assertion, speculation, memory and reverie.

It’s surely this potent mixture that appeals to Copperwhite rather than any specific narrative thread. Her paintings come across as attempts to express a comparable viewpoint, a viewpoint that she sees as being not exceptional but actually typical of our individual subjective experience.

Prisms and the rainbow spread of colours are recurrent motifs in the paintings and it’s useful to think of them in terms of prisms themselves. That is to say, rather than being resolved into a single, coherent image, the surface of each painting is a kind of prism through which that single image is refracted and separated into its myriad constituents: direct observation; a mass of associated memories and histories; theoretical constructions; fictions and feelings. We can’t see something, her work says, without bringing a great deal of baggage to the process. Hence the giddy instability of her paintings as images.

The interiors she maps out are amalgams of the many kinds of real, virtual and imagined spaces that routinely engage us. There’s the quick-fire domain of the video game in Pac-Man Will Delete Himself, for example, or the big workshop-studio of the show’s title painting, a modernist idealisation that includes an iconic Eileen Grey rug and the trapdoor, so to speak, of a flickering computer screen opening on to the endless, virtual space of the web. As in contemporary life, screens of various kinds recur, looming in the domestic, work and social arenas. Spectator simply features a woman watching, or more accurately absorbed in, the hypnotic glow of moving images on a television screen.

Seminal Influence visualises family likenesses transmitted through DNA, Sleeper No2refers us on to dreams. The prismatic imagery of An Abstraction of Youand Edge of the Known Universewas partly inspired by the idea that the carbon of cremated human remains can be compressed into graphite and ultimately synthetic diamonds.

Electronic Fossil on the Beachproposes a fossil for the information age, against the backdrop of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Jurassic Coast.

As Noel Kelly puts it when writing about her work, Copperwhite “focuses on how the human psyche processes information, and looks at the mechanisms of how we formulate what is real.” She suggests we do so by constantly juggling a multiplicity of sources, he elaborates.

Those sources increasingly consist of the electronic and digital ones, yet it’s striking that she deals with our experience of the contemporary using the traditional, centuries-old means of oil paint on canvas. That’s fitting because underlying the cultural and technological trappings, the same human concerns and priorities endure.

Copperwhite’s considerable achievement is to find a way of depicting the flux of the present moment in the dynamic equilibrium of her paintings.

An Island from the Day Before,recent paintings by Diana Copperwhite. Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Tues-Fri 10.30am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-5pm. Until November 5