VISUAL ARTS:DAVID KING is a painter with a leaning towards the gothic, something that is very evident in Solid Air,his exhibition at the Cross Gallery. But rather than simply working within the genre he explores, tests and extends it writes Aidan Dunne
Mind you, the show's first room has an overwhelmingly gothic feeling to it in the traditional sense of the term. He has trawled the internet for photographs of birdhouses and houses, and the former feature in a large number of small paintings made to a uniform format. Depicted in the snowy moonlight of winter, they have a heightened, theatrical air.
He's gone for the same exaggerated quality in the images of houses, which incline towards the ornate American gothic, with porches and various decorative flourishes, though instead of the full colour of the birdhouses, he puts us at one remove from the human dwellings by bleaching out the colour and contrast, so that it's as if we're looking at old, faded photographs. But King has been lulling us into a false sense of security. As we progress through the successive rooms of the Cross Gallery, we come upon a group of incomparably larger, bolder paintings, expansive landscapes made with great verve.
They are also pointedly ambiguous, evoking vast spaces but stopping short of straightforward representation. In their juxtaposition of overt painterly effects, such as copious drips and broad brushstrokes, and pictorial illusion that borders on cliché, they recall the work of Elizabeth Magill and Peter Doig. But King has a lot to contribute in his own right. He takes chances and makes some inspired choices, in terms of palette for example, so that the paintings are exciting. What's particularly striking is that his show is cleverly designed to make the most of the gallery's distinctive layout.
FOR A WORK that engages such a formidable array of talents, Here Lies in Film .. . at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios is underwhelming. It is a digital film installation based on the story of French dramatist Antonin Artaud's bizarre visit to Ireland in 1937. Arriving at Cobh with a cane "believed to be the staff of Saint Patrick" among other iconic figures, the clearly disturbed Artaud traveled to Inis Mór and elsewhere, leaving a trail of unpaid bills until he was arrested while trying get into a Jesuit building in Milltown in Dublin. He was deported and spent the next nine years in mental asylums where he was subjected to electroshock treatment.
Olwen Fouéré (one half of Operating Theatre, with composer Roger Doyle) plays Artaud, with a score by Doyle in a short film derived from a 2005 live installation which involved the theatre director Selina Cartmell. The cinematographer was the renowned Christopher Doyle and the editor Simon Hudson. The former has worked extensively with the celebrated Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, whose work is intensely visual. In fact, the dizzying, frenetic camera style Doyle devised for Chungking Express, and which has been widely imitated, is brought into play in visualising Artaud's state of paranoid delirium.
The project's theatrical origins presumably account for Fouéré's distinctly theatrical portrayal of the hapless Artaud, depicted adrift in a spartanly-furnished room, perhaps the lodging he found on Inis Mór. The imagery is subjectively blurred and distorted, Artaud rants semi-inaudibly and the music, with a nod to Miles Davis's score for Lift to the Scaffold, builds to a pitch that accords with the idea of the Theatre of Cruelty. It is, though, all very static, the only sense of movement being imparted by nicely inventive views of the sea rushing by from the vantage point of a passenger ferry, shown on separate screens.
DEBRA BOWDEN is an innovative printmaker who has worked extensively with Japanese woodblock printing, but entirely in her own idiom. She traveled to Awaji Island in Japan to learn from masters of the traditional craft and now conducts workshops herself teaching woodblock techniques. Her current show Natural Boundaries,at the Urban Retreat Gallery, moves on from her previous work, which was concerned with the concept of hearth and home in various ways. Her new work takes her from the internal spaces of house out into the landscape, both the garden around her own home, on the River Nore in Thomastown, and the wider environment on the coast in Co Kerry.
She uses plywood, including birch ply, and Japanese paper, and although she makes series from individual blocks, each piece is unique rather than being part of an edition in the conventional sense. She takes spare motifs, including the curved forms of beehive huts, the circular structure of a well, haystacks and stone walls and locates them within vigorously worked textural grounds representative of the earth, sea and sky. Her colour is rich but usually subtle - with the occasional burst of orange for montbretia in flower.
She successfully integrates the patterns of muscular, rough-hewn marks with much gentler, more understated effects, something that gives her work tremendous expressive range. She is more than capable of working on a relatively large scale, and there are perhaps too many small pieces in the show in proportion to the larger prints. Still, this is not to disparage the smaller works, many of which are beautiful and entirely at home with their own scale. It merits a visit to Hanover Quay.
RACHAEL GILBOURNE'S Digitalisat the monster Truck Gallery was an engagingly informal but pithy explication of emotional life and relationships with the drug of the title, derived from the common foxglove, playing a presumably metaphorical role. A little is good for certain heart conditions, a lot will kill you. Gilbourne's conversational approach juxtaposed lyrical representational paintings with tart graphic observations and abstract patterns proliferating across the walls. Any incipient tendency towards the preciousness or sentimental was efficiently skewered by an irreverently mischievous sense of humour.
Solid Airby David King, Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, until Nov 1; Here Lies in Film. . . by Operating Theatre and Christopher Doyle, Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, until Nov 1; Natural Boundariesby Debra Bowden, Urban Retreat Gallery, South Block, HQ Building, Hanover Quay; Digitalisby Rachael Gilbourne, Monster Truck Gallery and Studios, 73 Francis St.
