Visual Arts: Reviewed: 175th RHA Annual Exhibition, RHA, Gallagher Gallery, Dublin: Writing in the catalogue of the Royal Hibernian Academy's 175th Annual Exhibition, the current RHA President Arthur Gibney points to a centre of gravity that, ideally, holds together the considerable diversity of ends and means that make up the show.
That centre is drawing or, more precisely, "the implicit belief in the discipline of drawing" - that is, drawing in the Ruskinian sense, "as a way of seeing". Just as the Renaissance academies prized draughtsmanship, so should the RHA, Gibney argues. Drawing was the bedrock of the French academic tradition inaugurated by Poussin.
One could point out that photography wasn't around at the time, that photography now comes under the RHA's increasingly expansive umbrella and that in many respects the click of the shutter is the enemy of drawing. Too often the camera sees, rather than the person wielding the camera. Still, if, as in Ruskin's formulation, drawing is more about seeing than the act of describing, couldn't drawing be effected by mechanical means? Ingres, another champion of drawing - he famously wrote that it is "the probity of art" - said that if you didn't have a pencil to hand you should draw with your eyes.
As it happens, many painters and sculptors, including many exhibiting in this year's exhibition, routinely use the camera as a means to an end just as Poussin would have used numerous preparatory drawings. Furthermore, the development of digital photography has greatly enhanced the versatility of the medium when used in such a role. Drawing isn't what it was. Inroads by photography, Cad and other technologies have seen to that, and the process cannot be reversed.
At the same time, the RHA's expressed intention of re-establishing its school, with an emphasis on drawing, and the life drawing sessions currently proceeding at the academy, make sense and should be welcomed. As should the fact that this year's show features a new prize for and a room devoted to drawing. And not just any room, either, but one that many consider the best exhibition space in the building, Gallery II.
Despite all this, the show's drawing strand is relatively disappointing taken overall. There are many fine individual pieces, but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Luckily enough, the case for drawing, you could say, is substantially made elsewhere in the exhibition, where Ingres' assertion that drawing is three-quarters of a finished painting is borne out time and again. And as it happens, the photographic work is pretty good.
Because it is the 175th annual show, and perhaps because the academy has enjoyed an unprecedented renaissance in the last ten years and more, consolidating its position in terms of its Gallagher Gallery headquarters and the wider cultural landscape, a strategic decision was taken to reduce the proportion of exhibits selected from open submission and increase the list of invitees. The benefit is a certain solidity of quality, but it is virtually certain that the quality would have been there anyway with a reported open submissions pool of well over 4000 pieces.
Arthur Gibney is clearly aware of the risk of alienating part of the academy's support base with a punishing level of rejection - something like 160 got through - and notes that next year's show will be more proportionally generous to the non-invited, non-academicians. Apart from that, and the less than convincing showcase for drawing, he doesn't have much to worry about, and quite a lot to be proud of in this year's show.
It is difficult bordering on impossible to do justice to the sheer multiplicity of talents involved in an event featuring over 440 individual pieces. Just negotiating it is a marathon. But inevitably, for various reasons, certain pieces catch your eye and your attention along the way. It's nice, for example, to see work by Colin Harrison, a seriously underrated painter. His two small paintings combine, as ever, an awareness of art history with something of the aesthetic of European art house cinema.
The end wall of the main gallery is now given over annually to outsize pictures. "Outsize" because there is an academic tendency to produce occasional big paintings that lack a real sense of scale. Donald Teskey provides an antidote to this with a big, very ambitious landscape of the sea meeting a rocky shoreline. It's elemental and convincing. Equally (though not on the end wall), Martin Gale's In the Midlands is a large, moody, complicated narrative composition delivered with tremendous ability. Bernadette Kiely, Clement McAleer (very good textural painting) and Jonathan Hunter also earn the scale they work on.
One of the best paintings in the show overall is Sonia Shiel's Hole for the Sky because it achieves a kind of alchemical transformation of its modest materials. Gene Lambert shows an extraordinary work, Street, which displays a lovely touch for handling paint and a fine colour sense. There's refined touch, as well, in Diana Copperwhite's Iko, one of the few works - Pat Harris's is another - that deal with representation rather than merely representing.
Other strong paintings include Una Sealy's powerful narrative, The Leavetaking, a suite of works by Richard Gorman, Colm Lawton's meticulous image, recalling 19th-century realism, Veronica Bolay's heightened lyricism, Anita Shelbourne's subdued, meditative compositions, Mary Lohan's diptych, Campbell Bruce's understated but formidable interior study, TP Flanagan's predictably outstanding landscape, Liam Belton's exercises in precision, Jacqueline Stanley's landscape that leads us in as though it's a story, George Potter's crisp compositions, an excellent Gwen O'Dowd, Stephen McKenna's warm-hued though cool-headed classicism, Barbara Warren's western studies.
Gillian Kane's topographical drawing is a tour de force, David Lilburn is outstanding as ever, Jim Savage's The Mountain is an excellent drawing, Sam Walsh is also impressive. Others are dependable, though there is, as one observer remarked to me, an odd, recurrent emphasis on coniferous forests as subject matter among the drawings. In photography, Nigel Rolfe, Ruth McHugh, Michelle Murphy, Andreas Scholz (brilliant), Amelia Stein and Eileen E Lee all greatly enhance the show.
Portraiture is strong, with such highlights as Carey Clarke capturing Noel Sheridan, Mick O'Dea offering a lively study of Lynn Slattery, Maeve McCarthy's self-portrait, plus James Hanley and Neil Shawcross all notable.
Sculpture is also impressive. Among the highlights are Eilis O'Connell, Melanie le Brocquy, Tom Fitzgerald, Imogen Stuart, Michael Quane's extraordinary baroque carvings, a superb Graham Gingles cabinet and Deirdre McLoughlin's ceramic piece. Needless to say, this is not an exhaustive account of what's on offer and worth seeing.
Runs until Jun 25, 01-6612558
