On the face of it, printmaking is a two-dimensional business: the production of flat, multiple impressions of a given image. But the simple reproduction of an image is only part of the story. A necessary involvement in technique breeds a sensitivity to the physical substance of the work, and printmakers often turn out to be finely attuned to textural qualities. Such is the case with Felicity Clear, a Dublin-born artist currently exhibiting at the Rubicon Gallery. Previously best known as a printmaker, she has shown a penchant for complex textural effects and layered imagery, and her recent work consists of multi-media paintings.
One medium in particular marks a transition from print, and that is plaster, which she uses to great effect, like three-dimensional paint, laying it on fluidly, building it up, incising lines into it and (apparently) sanding it down to create substantial, irregular surfaces that recall weathered landscape. The plaster sometimes has the appearance of being shot through with a flush of muted pink or green, but here and elsewhere she is incredibly abstemious in her use of colour. She favours very close, pale tones and subtle juxtapositions, overprinting motifs white on off-white, for example, or in greyish tones. Which makes her occasional use of contrast all the more striking, as in the thick, ragged black slash that cuts through the largest piece, Donan-Duna-Dunav-Dunarea, or in the infrequent expanses or bursts of brighter, intense hues.
Schematic images of plants, laid out like rows of hieroglyphs, plus letters, numbers and symbols abstracted from a variety of contexts, including, apparently, weather maps, are worked into the plaster skin, as are long, continuous, meandering lines. These lines reinforce the notion that we are dealing with maps, in that they could easily demarcate international borders, coastlines or river routes. There is a sense of division, one area being differentiated from another, but not only division. The way various symbols are applied to the surface suggests not alone different identities but different priorities and categories of meaning, as if we are glimpsing cryptic fragments of someone else's ideas of order or usefulness.
In fact Clear has been more explicit in the past in dealing with the ways we understand the world. As the most undogmatic of artists, one never felt that she was banging a drum on behalf of any exclusive world-view - rather, while acknowledging the problems, she was gently exploring the possibility of a cautiously inclusive view, one that might accommodate, say, art and science, male and female. But always tentatively, always alert to the issues and contradictions. These observations surely apply here as well, but perhaps the main significance of the work in this show is that it represents a marked expansion of her technical means. She seems thoroughly at home in working adventurously on a large scale, for one thing, and uses her materials with great flair and authority, without ever opting for easy or showy effects. It's true her pictorial vocabulary owes much to the example of Antonio Tapies, probably the finest textural painter, but, taking a long view of her work, it's also true that it makes sense within the overall span of her development.
CONOR Walton, at Jorgensen Fine Art, is a young representational painter who bravely makes elaborate, and unfashionable, pictorial allegories, working from a basis in still life and figure composition, with copious referential dips into the alphabet soup of art history. There is, oddly enough, a small but significant group of such painters active in Ireland, including James Hanley and Aidan McDermott, who have in common an adherence to a realist style and the laudable ambition to use it to address contemporary issues, rather than treating representational painting as effectively defunct, good only as a vehicle for ironic or sentimental pastiche.
That said, Walton's work does tend towards the portentous, straining self-consciously for significance, and some of the figure compositions, including the undoubtedly ambitious Then We Upon Our Globe's Last Verge Shall Go II which depicts a number of people looking heavenwards, recall the bland, earnest tone of illustrations in propagandist religious publications. Nevertheless, he is a technically capable painter and a resourceful picturemaker, particularly in his employment of unusual viewpoints. In many of his compositions he favours dark, claustrophobic spaces raked by directional artificial light. There are probably too many symbol-laden still-lifes in which the rendering of fruit and glass and fabric (of the "Just look at the bloom on those plums!" school) isn't quite as sharp as, so to speak, it seems to think it is. But on the whole Walton emerges from the exercise as an interesting and promising artist.
Felicity Clear is at the Rubicon Gallery until April 17th. Conor Walton is at Jorgensen Fine Art until April 19th
