VISUAL ARTSReviewedTal R: House Of Prince and Hilma af Klint, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until February 17th (01-6081116)Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh: Deoraiocht, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until January 14th (01-8740064)Martin Healy: Here Be Monsters, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, ends today (01-6708055)
Given his reputation for having a laid-back approach to the business of making art, Tal R's House Of Prince is surprisingly profligate. Wow, you think on entering the gallery, someone's been busy. All the more so in a venue known for the austere aesthetic of its shows. The entrance walkway affords a panoramic view of three huge walls densely hung, pretty much from floor to ceiling, with boldly patterned, colourful paintings and compositions made from coloured, illuminated light bulbs. The latter touch is particularly clever, because it gives a seasonally buoyant, festive air. A few balloons strewn over the ground wouldn't seem out of place.
As explained in an accompanying note, the genesis of the work in the show is not inconsistent with such a reading. What we see represents the labour of four years, a coherent project consisting of pieces made in a space adjoining the artist's main studio, so in a sense a refuge from the everyday, an alternative space mentally as well as physically. Eschewing the dark undercurrent of other areas of his output, these paintings, collages and constructions "form a more abstract world that seeks to harmonise discord". The therapeutic dimension implied in such a description is hardly accidental, given that the works do seem therapeutic. They seem so in their casual, even offhand mode of production.
The word childlike has been used about Tal R's work generally, and it certainly applies here. His recourse to simple geometric patterns and intense colours in rainbowlike sequences is playful and benign. There is never any sense of correction or revision, of aiming for finish or proficiency, just the pleasure of dealing with physical objects, applying colour in the form of paint or paper or fabric. Splatters, drips, errant calculations, stains and scars are allowed to stand.
Mind you, there is a consistent structural pattern, a starting point or given that establishes the character and boundaries, and some of the pieces suggest an involved, aesthetic engagement. But not too many or too much. Generally, the feeling is one of relaxed exploration, a straightforward delight in the cumulative, overall effect of so much colour and pattern. And it's hard not to warm to the show on that level, as an entreaty to relax, take it easy, not get worked up about what art should or should not be. In this, there is a retrospective appeal to idyllic visions of alternative culture that emerged in the late 1960s.
The work of the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, on show in the Douglas Hyde's Gallery 2, was first publicised in the 1960s, 20 years after her death. She avoided showing it during her lifetime and specified the time lapse until it could be seen. Her finely wrought "occult pictures" are startling. Visionary, with a quality of obsessiveness, they suggest an underlying, mystical theory of everything. Based on the body of work of which the handful of paintings on view here are part, she is now regarded, the gallery says, as a significant forerunner of early 20th-century abstract art, a claim it's difficult to evaluate without seeing much more of her work and placing it in chronological context.
Certainly, though, at least one painting, Group Nine Series, SUW, Swan no. 12, with a spare circular composition, is on a par with anything contemporary and is exceptional in its formal daring. The most striking image, though, in work that explicitly refers to evolution and underlying reality, is a schematic depiction of what looks very like the double-helical pattern that turned out to be the key to unravelling the mystery of the structure of DNA. What's going on there, then?
Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh's paintings in Deoraiocht are broadly inspired by the artist's reading of Pádraic Ó Conaire's Scothscealtha. If such a description raises expectations of anecdotal illustrations, they are misplaced, because Ní Mhaonaigh is surely aiming for something else entirely. As she indicates herself, she sets out to approach the stories in terms of the charged, imaginative spaces they generate and allow us to access. These spaces bear the impress of living, complicated characters, although the characters are not directly depicted.
It is a relatively straightforward show, consisting of three larger painting and several smaller works, mostly studies. The best painting is the largest, Eatramh. Green fringes flank a large, central, pale expanse that darkens towards the top. It is, you could say, a very simple painting, but it's hard to make a good, simple painting, and Ní Mhaonaigh has succeeded here. There is a sense of almost physical excavation about that central space, which is cracklingly alive. And there isn't a mark or a line too much in the whole thing. There are affinities with the work of Patrick Graham, perhaps Patrick Hall and Basil Blackshaw, but also a distinct, individual voice.
Martin Healy's Here Be Monsters overlaps with his appearance in Eurojet Futures, at the Royal Hibernian Academy. His photographic and video work explores the mythology of demonic monsters that underlies the affluence of areas of semi-rural and suburban America, including Amityville and Pine Barons Forest, in New Jersey. The harshly lit, forensic photographs of conifer woodland in Wald I & II have an inbuilt unease.
More explicitly, the blurred, racing, black-and-white forest imagery of Here Be Monsters narrates the history of the fabled New Jersey devil. An accompanying series of stills, each with a description of the monster from a witness, builds to a composite series of wildly divergent, impossibly different accounts. The implication may be that the demons are conjured up in the heads of the observers, perhaps reflecting the dark side of the American dream. It is very accomplished, richly atmospheric work.
