Taking the Long view of an ideal world

VISUAL ART:JORGENSEN FINE ART is well settled into its Herbert St premises. It may not be quite as opulent as Molesworth St, but that probably gives it an edge as an exhibition venue.

Currently running is a solo show by John Long, a Portadown-born artist who after a year’s art study in Belfast went on to the Slade in London. There he took on, one might even say inherited, the classical, precise, idealised painting aesthetic of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow. The latter was teaching at the Slade when Long was there. Writing in the catalogue, Julian Freeman suggests that “it is best for audiences to set that fact aside”. Given Long’s pictorial style, that would not only be difficult but also a bit perverse. This is not to say he imitates Uglow, any more than Uglow imitated Coldstream. Rather, the perhaps obsessive approach to representation that Coldstream exemplified, with its constant recourse to measurement and its sense of underlying geometric structure, its desire to attain on canvas a clarity that admits the world’s complexity but transcends its messiness, has proved fruitful to many artists since, and indeed before, Coldstream. So to associate Long with Uglow does not detract from his clear abilities or his personal identity.

There is something Platonic about the desire to achieve an idealised version of reality on canvas. Long sticks to a few established genres – figures in interiors, still life, landscape – and there is a consistency and continuity to his pictorial world, which appropriately centres on the studio. His show is dominated by a series of studio interiors, at their heart the figure of a woman wearing, in most of the paintings in which she features, a black dress and a table with a few simple items, including wine, a jug, fruit and a candle. Paintings from art history are drafted in to feature in the backgrounds.

These references are elaborate and very well made. They also fit seamlessly into the overall compositions, underlining the fact that Long isn’t imitating the artists’ individual styles but regarding them with the same analytical gaze he brings to bear on his foreground subjects. Their poses too have their origins in art historical sources. À la Uglow, even the subtle modulations of the human body as defined by a definite light source are invested with geometric precision, an angular neatness.

This doesn’t do away with subtlety or with the feeling that the figure is that of a human being. The same drama is played out in the still lifes in which fruit or flowers feature: the aim is that analytical observation will not diminish the organic nature of the subject but enhance it. Furthermore, without setting up narratives, he is clearly concerned to convey a sense of inner life in his figurative subjects.

They have solidity, but they are also living, thinking and even, on occasion, dreaming.

The studio interiors are nocturnes, and the backgrounds are either dark grey or a strong, saturated red – a difficult, dominant colour choice. Long is drawn to red, and to orange, lent added zing by the glow of artificial light. It’s a surprise to move from the contained world of the studio out into the landscape in a group of small studies. These pose different problems for Long and push him towards new solutions. They don’t detract from his interiors, but they are such nice, relatively airy paintings that they make you want to see more.

AT THE TAYLOR GALLERIES, Pat Harris's exhibition Persian Flowerincludes floral still lifes and some landscapes. Although it's fair to call the paintings still lifes, the term doesn't quite describe them.

Harris was born in Dublin, studied at NCAD and has been based in Belgium for some time now. He teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Latterly, he has strengthened his connection with Ireland, spending time periodically in North Mayo. If Coldstream and Uglow are the artists most immediately relevant to Long, the name that comes to mind in relation to Harris is the Belgian Luc Tuymans, long a hugely influential, international figure.

Tuymans is famous for making paintings from second- or third-hand sources, old news photographs for example. What links him to Harris is their attitude to the essence or “aura” of the subject depicted in painting. Tuymans paints a fallen world in which painting itself is also fallen. Subject matter is reduced to faded traces, dim memories, something impossibly removed and drained of authenticity.

Representation is inherently problematic, particularly if it promises links to anything incontrovertibly real, and the artist begins from that premise. In many ways that describes Harris’s point of view in his work over the last 10 years and more. However, Harris has generally avoided working from the fragmentary, indirect documentary material that is Tuymans’s stock in trade. Instead, he has subjected established genres, particularly still life and landscape, and to a lesser extent portraiture (which he taught), to a comparable programme of doubt and questioning. Just as Tuymans arrives at some sort of paradoxical, stubborn, residual presence through the evocation of absence, so too does Harris.

The flower paintings are generally quite large in scale, but rather than being the kind of incredibly lush, dense arrangements of blossom and foliage that we find in classical Netherlands painting, they are sparse and unsure, sometimes intensely coloured but physically unstable and uncertain. It’s striking that the pale surfaces of what in conventional terms would be the backgrounds are mostly relatively thick and congealed. In gaining an opaque, palpable presence, the space surrounding the cut flowers has also become time, invading and gradually obliterating the vibrant immediacy of the blossoms. This is evident in the coastal landscapes of North Mayo as well, in which the durable solidity of headlands becomes ghostly and vague in the mists of time. It’s an outstanding show that merits a patient, considered look.

John Long. Jorgensen Fine Art, Herbert St, Dublin Until Nov 21; Persian Flower Paintings by Pat Harris. Taylor Galleries, Kildare St, Dublin Until Nov 21