Anne Madden's exhibition is called Trajectories and fills the three upstairs rooms of the Hugh Lane Gallery with a firm sense of thematic unity, or at least of close thematic interlinking. Essentially it is based on two Greek myths, the fall of Icarus and the Odyssey. Since the paintings range over two years, they partly hark back to the pictures she showed in Paris during the Imaginaire Irlandais festival of mixed memories.
The linking motif in the Odyssey series is the boat-shape which runs through it, crawling minutely though seas of colour like a small fishing-smack floating across the Mediterranean or Aegean. Though there is no suggestion of perspective in the usual sense, it is painted as though seen from above, rather as you might look down on the sea from a passing aeroplane. Sometimes it is dead centre in the canvas, sometimes it lurks on the outer areas of the picture, but in general it provides a kind of navel or vortex which holds things together.
The Icarus series, as might be expected, is dominated by a small winged shape, partly birdlike - there is a suggestion of the radiant Dove of Christian imagery - but also evoking the image of a blazing comet or shooting star. Icarus mounts, flies into the sun, soars to an exultant peak, melts and plummets earthwards, in an impressive and imaginatively conceived sequence full of rich tones. Again, one small motif or shape vitalises whole areas of deep, billowing but virtually image-less colour.
Anne Madden is always an accomplished technician and her touch has never been surer or more expressive than it is here. If, in certain cases, a decorative tendency does threaten to take over, the word "decorative" only applies in a high sense, as you might use it of Oriental screen-painting. Or to put it another way, these works function perfectly as abstract pictures in their own right, without the poetic inferences of the titles; but presumably they are "about" more than that and are, in effect, evocations of myth without being explicit.
On any of these levels, they seem to me to constitute her best exhibition to date, conveying a sense of inner conviction which does not conflict in the least with their international suavity and gloss. If these paintings had been sent to the recent Venice Biennale to represent us, I for one would have been better content with Ireland's presence there.
Runs until January
