Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed are Thomas Brezing: Remember When We Were Older, Christopher Banahan: Seawood and Press Play at the Green on Red Gallery
Thomas Brezing: Remember When We Were Older, RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until January 27th (01-6617286)
Christopher Banahan: Seawood, Hallward Gallery, Dublin, until January 27th (01-6621482)
Press Play, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until February 12th (01-6713414)
In Remember When We Were Older Thomas Brezing pursues a high-risk strategy by basing the title for his show on something his young daughter said to him. "In many ways," he says, "she had a big input in this body of work. . . . When she asks in the morning 'Is it another day?' I feel like running into the studio and painting something around those words."
Enthusiasm for notions built around the innocent wisdom of children can quickly pall for all save their adoring parents. And, anyway, it's not fair to thrust youngsters into the front line.
In the event Brezing's is a very good exhibition. It's good because, while drawing liberally on pearls of childish wisdom, there is in the end nothing overly cute or sentimental about it. He relishes the point of view bestowed by an innocent eye but doesn't pretend to innocence himself. There is a consistently dark undercurrent to the world he conjures up, a world with dreamy, storybook and theatrical qualities.
It's a shadowy world, described in silhouette built up in layers of pattern and texture, wintry in feeling. Whether consciously or not, in the paintings even innocuous goings on, related to entertainment or shopping, have a slightly ominous edge. This may have something to do with the idea that innocence must be protected, that it flourishes in the midst of an enveloping darkness.
Brezing favours a muted, tonal palette of mauve and purple greys, assembling compositions with a nice, offhand touch that recalls Paddy Graham and, occasionally, Anselm Kiefer in terms of pictorial architecture and strategy.
There is much common ground between his work and that of Chris Banahan in Seawood. Banahan is known for his reflective portraits of childhood in which children's faces are viewed, with a certain posed formality, through patterned fabric screens, a device that bestows a distanced, retrospective quality. It's a mood that fits Brezing's title phrase in the way it proposes a future recollection, a way of looking at the present as though we are already looking back on it.
Seawood features many works in this vein. Banahan works on wood, often allowing the grain to maintain a stubborn, residual presence, coming through the image, adding to the sense of duration, imparting the feeling that the image is tenuous, immaterial, barely there against the immensity of time. This is underlined in one piece in which the support is shaped like a thick volume, each ring of growth a page.
The show also includes several reflective self-portraits. The wide format gives a cinematic appearance to many of the figurative pieces, and several sensitive studies of hands further recall the compelling, meditative atmosphere of films by Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly Stalker and The Mirror, with their brooding, introspective air. In the paintings the detail, hands, stands in for the person and for inherited characteristic and abilities, suggesting a continuity. The idea of continuity is also found in visual quotations from Leonardo, Vermeer and others.
An accompanying note points out that the work follows a stay at Ballinglen Arts Foundation, in north Co Mayo, and a subsequent move from Dublin to Kinvara, on Galway Bay. Several views of Kinvara and studies of local flowers have an engaging, quiet casualness. Although the work cumulatively generates an atmosphere and is, individually, small in scale, there is probably too much in the show.
Press Play, a group show curated by Georgina Jackson, aims to address "the moment before the action", a moment of anticipation and uncertainty. It's an idea that has echoes of Jack B. Yeats's celebrated painting About To Write A Letter, which, oddly enough, would be perfectly at home in the company.
Though widely diverse in form and content, the pieces work together by virtue of their in- between status. For example, Julianne Swartz makes attenuated, linear sculptures that seem to defy gravity thanks to her use of magnets and wire.
The point of tension in her work is an empty space. For Jonathan Monk that empty space becomes prolonged anticipation. His typographic piece Meeting #79), "The Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin, Ireland, 2015, noon", is an undertaking to meet the purchaser (there's a €12,000 price tag) there and then.
Maria Marshall's 10,000 Frames not only presses play, however: it also presses fast forward, taking us on a frenetic visit to Walt Disney World, in Florida. It's frenetic because the whole trip, from and back to London, is compressed into the 10,000 frames of the title, a stop-action epic complete with speeded-up but intelligible narration. As you might expect, it's a sunny, brightly coloured, plasticky experience. It's also quite funny.
But the main effect of concentrating the experience in this way is to generate a sense of incredible excess. It's all too much, the conspicuous, endless, fetishised consumerism, particularly in relation to food. In the speeded-up context the fast-food meals are consumed at intervals of seconds - "All you can eat for $7".
Walt Disney World is the setting, but the video is about something wider, something the theme park could be seen as exemplifying: a culture of out-of-control commodification and consumerism. It's extremely effective.
