Visual Arts:A few things might strike you immediately if you see Mark McGreevy's paintings. They are toy-like and colourful, sometimes to the point of psychedelia.
They look as if they were fun to do, which is not that common, currently, when the dominant mode of painting internationally could be described as a kind of washed-out near-monochromatic realism.
And they display a tolerance of sheer messiness that is rare outside of Expressionism, although McGreevy is not an Expressionist.
His current exhibition, A Gap in the Bright, at the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, is the first in a series of three shows curated by Megan Johnston under the collective title Beneath the Painted Surface. Her idea is to select three Northern Irish artists who "investigate the liminal (ie thresholds, boundaries and borderlines) and subliminal elements" in painting. The basic proposition is that, since the invention of photography, painters have had to renegotiate their position in relation to the representational paradigm that dominated Western art from the Renaissance onwards.
One might ask whether they have merely been fighting a rearguard action or if they have managed to devise viable and rewarding strategies. Just think of the world without Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, abstraction in general and more recent initiatives and the answer would seem to be that the advent of photography certainly didn't mean the end of painting, though admittedly some might prefer that it had, or that the art of painting was fixed in aspic. But in the immediate context of Johnston's sequence of shows, we should consider how McGreevy fits into the picture.
His work has a sprawling, exuberant energy that mimics natural prolificacy, as though each painting is a fiercely competitive ecosystem, a piece of rainforest, perhaps, in which multiple organisms battle for survival, poised in precarious and dynamic balance.
He doesn't deny anything the opportunity to flourish in the nutritive mix of pigment, but he isn't sentimental, either, and allows myriad elements of a painting to be overwritten and subverted.
That is, he follows in the direction each painting seems to want to travel.
Previously, he has drawn extensively if selectively on imagery and ideas from science fiction, fantasy and computer games, so that the paintings became virtual spaces, often densely populated by eclectic casts of characters. 20,000 Suckas to the bottom of the nugget, the oldest work on view, offers such a landscape, though it is firmly anchored by a definite horizon line. It also strangely recalls Bosch's celebrated The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Recognisable forms and elements do still appear in more recent pieces. They include humans and other animals, houses and larger architectural constructions, sailing ships, trees and a whole range of vegetative shapes, lakes and seas - and his trademark rainbows.
But such readily comprehensible things are inextricably meshed with more abstract, biomorphic shapes, ambiguously evocative of free-floating elements of the internal anatomies of plants and animals, or perhaps suggestive of hybridised, mutant organisms. You could say that there is, in fact, a perpetual struggle between orderly systems and the breakdown of order.
McGreevy has himself used the term utopian in relation to his work, and you can see why. In his paintings it is as if he proposes alternative worlds, often with fantastic, magical qualities. But the plural "worlds" is closer to the mark than any single utopian vision.
Because his paintings combine overlapping, multiple realities, or multiple readings of reality in inextricable masses, they never settle down into any one idealised space and are always fractured and uneasy. Furthermore, his new work looks more dystopian than utopian.
Playful qualities persist, but there is a distinctly monstrous edge to many of his inventions, and the mood is perceptibly darker.
If one were to try to locate McGreevy in a wider cultural landscape, apart from HG Wells and Jules Verne, both of whom he has mentioned, useful literary references would surely include William Gibson's dark cyberpunk novels, the freely inventive fictions of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. All of these writers are more conventionally coherent than another clear influence, William S Burroughs, whose cut-up technique and concept of the in-between space of the "interzone" seem particularly pertinent to McGreevy's methods.
In painterly terms, more obviously perhaps in this show than in previous ones, David Crone is obviously a significant figure in indicating the potential of a particular kind of imaginative space and how to work within it. More generally, Fiona Rae and Peter Doig are relevant. This is not to say that McGreevy is directly influenced by them, but there is common ground.
Equally, while he operates in a different vein to Cecily Brown, what she does makes for an interesting comparison. In his catalogue text, Patrick Murphy also points to Arshile Gorky, a formative influence on the American Abstract Expressionists, whose extraordinary biomorphic landscapes do indeed look like antecedents of McGreevy's. And the visceral shapes in Pink Mist and elsewhere bear a striking resemble to some of Francis Bacon's more extreme figurative distortions.
In short, McGreevy is working in a rich area, one with real potential. He hasn't been tempted to settle down into a stylistic formula, and has consistently developed his painterly language. He is also laudably ambitious in taking on, and managing well, paintings of real scale. On the debit side, some of the painting in A Gap in the Bright is a bit heavy-handed, something that might have to do with how he sets about articulating specific motifs within a composition.
As though larger, more definite motifs come at the cost of touch and finesse. But if this exhibition catches him at a moment of transition, it also leaves us wanting to see where he's going.
A Gap in the Bright: New Work by Mark McGreevy, Millennium Court Arts Centre, William Street, Portadown, until Jan 26. Details: 048-38394415
