Reviewed:
Too Dark for Night, Clare Langan, Green on Red Gallery until March 3rd; Daisy Richardson, new paintings, Ashford Gallery, RHA, until February 28th; Quiet, Marc Reilly and Ben Reilly, The Paul Kane Gallery until February 24th; The Drumshanbo Paintings, Denis Farrell, Taylor Galleries until February 24th; Soundings, Mairead O'Neill Laher, Origin Gallery until March 3rd
Clare Langan's 10 minute film, Too Dark for Night, takes the basic pictorial template of the romantic sublime - that is, a solitary human presence dwarfed by the terrible beauty of an immense natural setting - and transposes it to a post-industrial, perhaps post-apocalyptic world.
Casper David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Mists becomes an ambiguous, distant guide, leading us through a sand-blown inferno. The reassuring solidity of the rocky mountain peaks of Central Europe is replaced by the ominous shifting sands of gigantic dunes marching across the desert.
Though the images are designed to be strangely distorted and difficult to grasp, the narrative progression is more straightforward. We press on, from dunes to the stunted remains of a petrified forest, along the tracks of an abandoned railway and, finally, reach journey's end in a derelict settlement, its streets and buildings clogged with sand and dust. The spiritually affirmative vision of nature as God's handiwork is here replaced by successive layers of doubt and growing uncertainty.
In a way, we've been here before, and with Langan, in her previous film Forty Below, except that on that occasion the apparent catastrophe was at the other end of the climactic scale, and we found ourselves in a bleak, frozen, watery world. Her approach is deliberately climactic rather than geographical in that, whatever locations she finds, the specific where becomes a non-specific anywhere, though this time round a plaintive vocal on the soundtrack does have a distinct hint of North Africa about it.
This is the second part of a trilogy and so far, unless there's a major change of mood in the final instalment, things look pretty bleak.
Daisy Richardson's foray into a personal vein of magic realism at the Ashford could easily come across as merely twee or precious, but she deftly sidesteps any and all pitfalls to produce a terrific, very enjoyable show - one that, apart from its considerable merits piece for piece, also deserves to be seen as a bravura exercise in installation. Her brief statement promises work "populated by animals, people in their animal form" and even people in structural guise, as houses, and that is pretty much what we get.
It would be a mistake to patronise the work as "just" fantasy, despite its fairy-tale, theatrical trappings. Richardson combines a wonderfully inventive imagination with a casual though judicious sureness of touch, and there is an intriguing consistency to the metamorphic fantasy world she devises - a fantasy that has real depth and darkness as well as lightness. Perhaps most importantly, she has the story-teller's gift of persuading us to enter her world.
Colour-field painting is revisited by Marc Reilly and Denis Farrell at the Paul Kane and Taylor galleries, respectively. The informal geometry of Farrell's compositions in The Drumshanbo Paintings encompasses stripes and grids, a risky business given Sean Scully's dominant position in that particular territory, not to mention the Antipodean example of Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Because Scully has gathered up the stripe and the grid in an heroically ambitious stylistic synthesis, the kind of inclusive grand style more associated with modernism than postmodernism, the sheer gravitational pull of his work has made it difficult for other painters to adopt a similar vocabulary.
Still, Farrell handles paint well, with a delicate rather than an assertive touch, and a good colour sense to match. He doesn't quite avoid the Scully factor, but his work does have a lot more going for it as well, with subtle evocations of precursors as diverse as Paul Klee and Jules Olitski. The sliding yellow field of Through and Beneath hints at a nice development of Olitski, for example. Farrell quite rightly doesn't want to over-work things, and the light crispness of his surfaces is part of their appeal, but it has to be said that there are too many pictures in the show, and you get the feeling that the big ones, particularly, are less than they might have been.
Reilly is more concentrated and sure, boldly creating a series of strikingly coloured monochromes, jumping confidently from very small to very large and, incidentally, making some interesting juxtapositions in the process. Built up in thin layers to subtly beautiful surfaces that invite lingering examination (perhaps contemplation is a more appropriate term), his paintings have a terrific, relaxed presence and require little comment.
In the same gallery, Ben Reilly's large-format colour photographs form part of a disturbing project, during which he constructed a shrouded, life-like figure and floated it in a lake. Rather than coming across as merely grisly, the images have a ritualistic, funereal quality, and the figure becomes something symbolic, a memorial object.
The gestural painterly language of Mairead O'Neill Laher's work at Origin is also a venture into daunting artistic company. Her tempestuous evocations of space and atmosphere do have a lot going for them, but they never quite clinch the argument. She has trouble finding an appropriate scale, just the right quality of touch and her own colour range. Her colour tends towards harshness, as if she hasn't worked towards developing what de Kooning described as the right "family" of colours. Yet there is more than enough that is right in her work to make us look forward to seeing more of it.
