Visual Arts: Reviewed: Nick Miller: genre. Butler Gallery, until December 5th (056-7761106).Mark O'Kelly: Old Holland, New Amsterdam. Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, until December 3rd (01-8740064)
Nick Miller's genre shuffles through several painting genres and unifies them within one specific sense of the term: "Painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday life, usually realistically." The show incorporates portraits, still lifes and landscape - various genres that, for Miller, collectively come under the umbrella of genre painting: scenes from his everyday life. Domesticity, the studio, family, friends, the landscape. And he has perhaps established another genre of his own, in the form of the postcard painting, which have a ubiquitous, almost talismanic presence in his work.
As his exhibitions at the Gallagher Gallery and elsewhere over the last few years have shown, Miller's landscapes are exceptional. They are made out in the landscape - he works from the vantage point of an adapted truck, a mobile studio with an open back, open to both the visible subject and the damp chill of the Irish weather. But plein air painting, even with that twist, is not his invention. Something else sets his work apart: the incredible proliferation of detail, and the way it is configured in a material medium. It is as if paint is not so much colour for Miller as substance, providing a concrete equivalent of the visible world.
His sustained, attentive and meditative engagement with the landscape generates works with the visual density of medieval painting, so it's no surprise to see Breughal's Hunters in the Snow as one of the postcards propped against the easel in the studio. In a way, the detail is overwhelming, but we can cope; it's just that the paintings demand to be looked at as paintings and not glanced at as images. There is a vivid sense of the insane profusion of nature, the massive, cyclical generative effort that might envelope the countryside in wet organic greeness, obliterating all traces of the human presence, the power lines, roads, isolated houses.
To Sligo; Wall, lane; and Lake rain are outstanding, but there isn't a below par landscape in the show. The studio still lifes, in which dying flowering plants are arranged on the easel, usually with postcard reproductions, have become something of a Miller staple. It could be the shape of the easel that prompts crucifixion images. Then there are brooding portraits, stubbornly uningratiating works that centre on heads and often leave the bodies curiously ethereal, or structurally disjointed and hence immaterial. Miller probably won't be invited to make flattering portraits of public figures, but his subjects are flattered by being treated as essential and real, individuals involved in a strange, uncertain artistic transaction.
In Old Holland, New Amsterdam at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Mark O'Kelly exhibits paintings, some of which are obviously linked in terms of their subject matter, and some not obviously. Of the seven paintings, three depict aspects of a fashion show: ranks of models on the catwalk, a single model with a painted face and a seated, expectant audience. We also have a still life of atlases and a map of The Americas, a densely vegetated tropical looking forest, a postcard-like windmill - Old Holland - and a highrise industrial building, Jenoptik.
There are links in terms other than subject matter. In common with a great deal of contemporary representational painting, O'Kelly's imagery is drawn from second-hand sources, so that he makes representations of representations - there is a certain critical distance involved with the procedure. The eclectic breadth of his references brings to mind Gerhard Richter and his photo archive: images that hold his attention in some way or another, culled from myriad sources, potential but not definite source material for paintings.
Then, all the paintings are put together with the same calm, methodical precision, giving them an evenness of temper.
Although evidently taken from photographs or photographic reproductions, they are not photographic, although clearly they could be if that was the effect he was aiming for. Instead he holds back, giving them an approximate, handmade quality. An accompanying note refers to his use of "subtly iconic" images. They are not iconic in the conventional sense, but there is something instantly recognisable about most of them, as though we are primed to read them in a certain way.
The sense of analytical distance generated by O'Kelly's method gives his work an almost anthropological quality. But it's more a question of creating a mood of visual attentiveness, of making us look carefully. He throws in various clues and correspondences that seem to invite interpretation, but avoids specific narrative or moral meanings. We pick up on the ritualistic social qualities of the fashion show, link the face paint of the model with the pristine tropical forest, sense that new and old worlds construct reciprocal images of each other, perhaps courtesy of the image factory in Jenoptik.
