VISUAL ARTS / Aidan Dunne: Portraits, Alice Maher, Green on Red Gallery until May 17th (01- 6713414);Colin Davidson, Solomon Gallery until May 7th (01-6794237);Painting, Ashford Gallery until May 9th (01-6617286)
The 12 photographs that make up Alice Maher's exhibition Portraits at the Green on Red Gallery are, collectively, one portrait, a composite self-portrait of the artist herself. Directly and indirectly, she has often used herself as protagonist in her work, most obviously in her Thicket drawings from 1990, which featured an alter ego, a wilful, capricious Alice in Wonderland figure, assertively taking on the world. To make an exhibition of 12 lavishly staged self-portraits may sound like an exercise in narcissistic self indulgence, but there is nothing egotistical about it.
It is self-obsessed to the extent that it has to do with self-exploration. Not at all untypically, she is investigating her place in the world. Previously, in the same gallery a show by Fergus Martin featured a series of photographic self-portraits in which, by mirroring one side of his face to produce a perfectly symmetrical head, he made a stranger of himself. Maher also transforms her image, but in a different way - or ways.
The photographs feature her posed against plain backgrounds, mostly red, although there is also a deep, inky black. The formality and precision of the images recall renaissance portraiture, but pastiche is not what she has in mind. Each involves the embellishment or concealment or transformation of part of her head or body by a strange manifestation of some natural material, including raspberries, sprouting twigs, magpie feathers, yew foliage and snail shells.
Generally, Maher's work draws on areas of reference deeply embedded in cultural history: folk and fairy tales, myth, local tradition, medieval history. She is partial to the odd, disconcerting detail, to the ordinary enveloped by a dreamlike strangeness. At least two aspects of her Tipperary childhood are important in shaping her vision. One is her experience of the agricultural and natural landscape as a vast, inviting domain, the other is an awareness of the Norman imprint on the land in terms of strategic keeps, ritualised social order and a highly structured iconography.
Both are evident in the Portraits, with their rigorous formality, their references to armour, ornament and defence, and then their disturbing, unruly eruptions of wild, unpredictable, uncontrollable aspects of nature. Hair, which she has used extensively as a subject, similarly combines these qualities. It sprouts spontaneously and, in the case of Melisande, unstoppably, but is tamed by the application of pattern.
The Portraits inevitably bring to mind Ovid's Metamorphoses. The first metamorphosis was the divine transformation of chaos into order. Usually in the narrative pattern of the myths, the transformation, when it comes, signals a divine intervention but also the evasion of divine or temporal wrath. Daphne, pursued by Apollo, is transformed into a laurel.
Similarly, you could say that Maher appropriates elements of the natural world as defensive aids, as with the twigs that make an unlikely necklace, encasing her head behind a Palisade. In Limb, she is a version of Daphne, quizzically but calmly surveying the transformation of her arm into a densely textured yew branch.
More straightforwardly, her use of the various natural materials could be interpreted as indicating aspects of her character. And on occasion there is a distinctly malign element to the way things transplant themselves parasitically onto her skin. Characteristically, despite the precision of the imagery involved, Maher is not prescriptive about meanings. Here she has produced an ambiguous, vivid and haunting body of work.
Colin Davidson, at the Solomon Gallery, lays it on with a trowel. His paintings of landscape and figurative subjects are not so much thickly painted as built from solid masses of pigment. It is not necessarily helpful to describe someone's work in terms of resemblance, but here it's hard not to think of a few exemplars. For such thick paint Frank Auerbach is an obvious suspect. For the briskness of delivery and the angular markings Brian Ballard comes to mind. But the pale palette and the evident desire to grasp the essence of the thing also distinctly recall Basil Blackshaw.
Davidson has to suffer in any comparison with Blackshaw, who is a very fine, sophisticated painter, and a subtle one, forever challenging himself. Davidson attacks the canvas with great vigour and determination, but he doesn't always come away with a convincing image, and he is inclined to slip into stylistic mannerisms. One imagines that the sheer, accumulating bulk of each painting as it is made sets limits on what can be done, and more than once Davidson paints himself into a cul-de-sac. On the whole, the figurative pictures are the best things in the show.
Painting, at the Ashford Gallery, marshals four painters who are observers of urban life. Just about in the case of Rod Coyne, whose boldly designed, decisive studies of the sea around Dublin are atmospherically good. Ronan Goti focuses on the sea in a different way, depicting groups of figures clinging together and balanced precariously and playfully on rocks as the tide laps at their feet. Both Matthew Cave and Cilla Patton concentrate on absolutely ordinary, everyday exchanges in interesting ways, going for the fleeting textures of everyday life. It is in all a likeable, thoughtful exhibition.
