Reviewed: The Landing, Mary Kelly, RHA Gallery II until August 24th (01-6612558);Between Sunlight and Shadow, T.P. Flanagan, Taylor Galleries until August 2nd (01-6766055)Out Here, Oliver Comerford until August 30th (01 6710073).
The Landing in Mary Kelly's photographs is a landing in Portlaoise Prison, where she was artist-in-residence earlier this year. Each image gives us a uniform format view of an individual cell from the outside looking in. What particularly struck Kelly was the way each prisoner imprints a personal identity on the space, to some degree domesticating the institutional uniformity and anonymity. She quotes Gaston Bachelard on how we make home of wherever we happen to find ourselves, regardless of the physical constraints.
The exhibition also features a video piece, The Blue Room, set in a prisoners' recreation room.
Since the video depends on your progressive interpretation of image and sound, it would be best to see it from the beginning and unfair to describe it in too much detail. But it works effectively as a visualisation of inner and outer worlds in the prison. It has an uncomfortable intensity and is open to levels of interpretation.
The images of the cells are very striking and certainly engage our curiosity. Each image is a glimpse into an individual personality, a private world. There is a problem about colour photography, however, which is that it tends to aestheticise subject matter, regardless of the actual context.
Somehow, black-and-white is more atmospherically precise. As you make your way around this selection of very good, formalised colour images, you could absent-mindedly start to view imprisonment in terms of the problem of how best to decorate your cell. After all, if Township Chic can form the basis for a glossy coffee-table book on interior design, as it does, why not Prison Chic? But this minor caveat is not to trivialise a good and significant exhibition.
T.P. Flanagan's is a remarkably focused talent, and an exceptional one. He is a brilliant landscape watercolourist whose place in Irish art history is assured on the basis of the body of work he has made to date. As his show, Between Sunlight and Shadow, demonstrates, however, he is not resting on his laurels.
Born in Co Fermanagh, he also spent a great deal time during his childhood in Co Sligo, in and around Lissadell, and these linked landscapes, together with the rather different physical environment of Co Donegal, form the core of his subject matter. His work has a very precise sense of place. He is thoroughly at home in low-lying, soft, watery Fermanagh, and in the dense romantic woods of Lissadell. His evocations of these close-up worlds of impossibly lush growth, tangled vegetation, glimpses of water and warm, moist air are atmospherically precise.
They are also amazingly understated. Flanagan builds up his pictures in subtle, tonal washes. Brian Kennedy, writing in the show's catalogue, comments on his calligraphic brushwork. It is calligraphic to the extent that he seems to busily write much of the substance of the images in fast, urgent thickets of brush-strokes. But the subtlety of tone, composition and colour mean that all of this activity amounts in the end to scenes of calm serenity.
We get a tremendous sense of the dappled light, the labyrinthine spaces and expanses of water. All the detail is there, but it never overwhelms the poise of the overall composition. Early Morning Above a River here is audaciously spare but uncannily accurate. There is a sizeable proportion of oil paintings in the show. Flanagan tends to use oil paint in a highly personalised manner, and very effectively. In their understatement and clarity, the show's title painting and A Beach for Seals are good examples. Arrangements of abstract calligraphic marks are somehow transformed into highly structured accounts of landscape. It is a very enjoyable exhibition and, as ever with Flanagan, a bit of a masterclass.
There are just four paintings in Oliver Comerford's exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery, Out Here, but they are all large works featuring expansive tracts of territory. They continue to focus on the sparse, wintry terrain that has become a feature of his work in the past few years. He likes chill, empty spaces, neither here nor there, in between city and country.
He favours night-time or dusk, as fading daylight and electric light bleed into each other. Our viewpoint, in the pictures, is of someone in transit, pausing on a lonely mountain road from which we look back down on the city lights.
The mood of each of these paintings reinforces that of the others. It all adds up to a sense of isolation and separation. But they seem to indicate not so much a feeling of loss or loneliness as a need for distance, for melancholy isolation. It would be overstating things to say that the pictures suggest an actual relish of this bleak physical and psychological space, but in them we are not so much reluctant exiles as ruminative travellers in search of something.
Comerford paints thin, often further scraping into the surface as if to emphasise that we are looking at just a mere skin of pigment. He uses the optics of photography in the way he paints, working from photographs and exploiting associations with film. He avoids naming the places that we see in the images, though they are specific places and are, on occasion, fairly recognisable. Perhaps this is because, in the end, he is much more interested in making emotional landscapes than in providing topographical descriptions.
