The material gains of taking a different tack

ONE OF THE most dramatic examples of progress within a particular discipline in recent Irish art is the transformation of Paul Doran’s work between his fine-art degree show at the NCAD in 1997 and his MA show a few years later.

Whereas his paintings in the former were clearly indebted to Howard Hodgkin, to the extent that they could be described as an homage, his MA work, while receptive to several lines of development in contemporary painting, were really indebted to no one. They were, in fact, startlingly, excitingly fresh, accomplished and distinctive.

They were also immensely appealing to look at, and it was no surprise that his MA show sold out, as did his subsequent touring show in 2003-2004. He’s by no means the first artist to relish the succulent materiality of oil pigment, but his management of the medium – in small, concentrated compositions, often sculptural in the extraordinary density and thickness of their impasto – was assured and convincing. It should be said that there wasn’t a trace of self-indulgence, or of reliance on the inherent attractiveness of the paint, in what he did. Rather, he was and remains a fiercely exacting explorer of the medium.

His current Green on Red Gallery exhibition, An idea for something better, exemplifies two sides of his artistic personality: his absolute commitment to questioning every aspect of process and substance, and an equally strong conviction that he can make something true and beautiful. Looking back, the work in his 2006 exhibition Metamorphosis suggested that he wasn’t quite striking a balance between these two core values. Among other things, he’d been thinking about the emergence of representation in early Renaissance painting, and in particular the increasingly sophisticated depiction of a three-dimensional world on a flat, two-dimensional surface.

Oil paint is incredibly versatile and protean – as the title suggests, Doran had Kafka in mind – but rather than effecting a magical transformation, each picture ended up in something of a cul-de-sac, somehow imprisoned by the invented architectonic space it mapped out. The paintings looked okay, but they brought to mind Beckett’s remark about the Italian Renaissance painters looking at the landscape with the eyes of building contractors.

One wondered if Doran could find his way out of the cul-de-sac. It took him a while, but he did. His next solo show at the Green on Red, in 2009, steered clear of such definite images. Indeed, rather than using a title as allusive as Metamorphosis, he called it simply New Work, and every piece in it was labelled Untitled. As he put it: “The new paintings suggest figurative elements, without revealing specific details.” Being specific in an illustrative way, in other words, would be to fall into a trap. Colour was more subdued than it had been in his earlier work; although, without any obvious resemblance being evident, his early interest in Hodgkin again informed his general approach, together with the spirit of Paul Cézanne.

“Dark triangles are hidden behind a muddy veil,” is the way he described one painting, and muddy is a term appropriate to the show in general and its vocabulary of, again, in his own words, “stripes, blobs, smears, scratches”. Muddy as the colour was, there was something cheering, playful and irresistibly engaging about the paintings. One could enjoy them in the same way as a set of closely related musical compositions.

In An idea for something better, he carries on from the 2009 show rather than looking back to 2006. Cézanne is still important, as the title of one piece, Build it like a Cézanne, makes clear, a reference to Cézanne dealing with the chaos of nature by organising the landscape into an orderly arrangement of geometric forms – cones, cylinders and cubes. In this particular work, as in many others in the show, Doran takes Cézanne’s idea a step further, dismantling and rebuilding the very fabric of the painting, not just the image within the frame.

There’s an emphatically lo-tech, handmade quality to the way he does this, a quality that is by no means unique to him. Indeed, many artists have responded to the incredible rise of digital imaging technologies not by embracing them but by emphasising their opposites: traditional means and materials, craft processes, the rough-hewn and gritty as opposed to the frictionless ease of electronics. That doesn’t define Doran’s work, or the work of such contemporaries as Mark Swords or Fergus Feehily, but it’s an aspect of it.

As an artist, Doran is an assiduous, even obsessive worker. The studio is his laboratory and, looking around the current exhibition, it’s clear that he has reached beyond its immediate bounds to incorporate the living space beyond the studio. The conventional “oil on canvas” hardly qualifies as a description of what we see. Omnivorously, he grabs pretty much everything to hand and puts it to work in a painting, including existing paintings, which are cannibalised relentlessly, collaged and cut up, turned inside-out and back-to-front. Also among the media used are bits of recycled paper, clothing, assorted fabrics, thumb tacks, staples and lollipop sticks.

Each piece has a title and usually you can link the title to something in the work, whether it be a particular motif or the strategy employed in its making. Secret, for example, turns its back to us, and we get only a glimpse of bright yellow coming through. The show’s overall title perfectly conveys the mood of kitchen-sink improvisation, the notion of working fast and inventively with what is to hand. Is Armchair, one of the more colourful and high-spirited pieces, a picture of an armchair? Who knows? But it’s worth remembering Matisse’s celebrated and much criticised statement that “a painting should be like a comfortable armchair”. There’s far too much going on with each painting by Doran to allow such ease or complacency, but there’s also a huge amount to enjoy.

An idea for something better, new paintings by Paul Doran, is at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin until April 14th. Greenonredgallery.com