Visual Arts: In Restoration at the Rubicon Gallery, Finnish artist Ilkka Halso presents us with photographic documentation of his own fictional restoration sites.
But the subjects of his notional restorations are not buildings or other historical artefacts. Elaborate structures of scaffolding and polythene, constructed by the artist himself, shelter pieces of nature - a tree, a boulder, part of a cornfield - from the elements. These isolated fragments are depicted by night, illuminated by floodlights, adding to the strange, surreal air of the images.
The work alludes to our relationship with "nature" and can be interpreted in different ways. There is an implication that we have to work to preserve and protect what we think of as natural or, to turn the proposition around, that what we think of as being natural is actually something corralled and artificially preserved. Equally we could see it as referring to the human inclination to meddle with things, to improve on nature.
In what looks like the largest-scale project depicted, the exceptionally ambitious Museum of Nature, the elaborate structure, which frames a sizeable copse of trees, recalls the great age of the Victorian glasshouse, with that era's invincible belief in its own mastery of the material world. Yet what we take away from Halso's work is a niggling feeling that things are out of balance, that we have entered a twilight zone of radical engineering. The work is striking and distinctive.
Mark Garry, Tony Swain and Andrew Vickery share the Kerlin Gallery. A substantial portion of Vickery's work played a significant role in his Douglas Hyde Gallery show, Do you know what you saw? An installation, it consisted of slides of a series of paintings projected onto a theatrical backdrop, with a musical soundtrack. An evocation of a trip to Bayreuth to see a performance of Parsifal, it blurred the line between the imaginative world of the opera and the artist's own experience. In the Kerlin, we see the original paintings, exhibited in a composite grid, together with a number of Theatre Scenes.
That overall title presumably refers to the way Vickery makes representational images in a simplified, flattened style. There is an element of wilful naivety involved in the process that relates to Vickery's interest in the image as a window onto a space of theatrical - one might even say magical - potential.
Swain's paintings also suggest an interest in the possibility of different, imaginative spaces, though he goes about realising that possibility in a different way. He paints onto irregular pieces of newspaper pages, sometimes collaging different pieces together. Apparently using existing features on the page as a starting point, he builds up quirky spatial structures and patterns. These sometimes complicated architectonic compositions have the air of being entirely arbitrary but also oddly compelling. It is as if they emerge from an obsessive-compulsive process. The throwaway nature of the support underlines the tenuous, in-between nature of the space they generate and occupy.
Garry's installation takes as its starting point a houseplant and then, a brief accompanying statement intimates, sets out to make a metaphorical representation of sorts, charting the way this object, as visual and intellectual information, proceeds through the neural pathways of eye and brain - or something like that. This, at any rate, would fit in the previous pattern of Garry's work, which has seen him translate one set of coherent information into a sequence of arbitrary metaphorical forms, each progressively more difficult to read, yet maintaining something of the original motif. He demands, in other words, a mental leap, and faith on our part that we will end up somewhere interesting. It's a close call, but so far so good.
There is a retrospective feeling to Cara Thorpe's paintings at the Ashford Gallery. The show is untitled yet practically everything in it seems to form part of one thematic series. All the pictures are small and all made to the same dimensions. Their surfaces bear the evidence of layer on layer of working and reworking. Against this sequence of painting and scraping away, fragments of representational imagery are selectively preserved and allowed a faded, residual presence. Although the paintings use a lot of colour, the representational elements are monochromatic and have a documentary, photographic quality.
While the sources are unspecified, most of them look as if they date from the second World War. Collectively, the paintings make up a distanced overview, encompassing everything from minor, individual incidents to major offensives and landmark peace conferences. But, partly because of that distance, there is also a sense of timeless context. The way the paintings are made suggests a process of repetition and circularity. All this is capably done. It is also true that the detached stance, the cool manipulation of imagery and the calculated ambiguity are characteristic of a lot of contemporary painting.
For obvious reasons, there's a degree of bravery involved in being a portrait painter, even more so if you commit yourself to working directly from life. It's common practice to work from various sources including, notably, photographic. Anything, in fact, that will help towards making a conclusive image. But there is something special about the lived encounter between artist and sitter, a phenomenon memorably explored by Nick Miller in his series of drawings, Closer.
For his exhibition Audience at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Mick O'Dea committed himself to an unprecedented marathon of one-on-one portraiture. There are 44 paintings of uniform, substantial size on the walls, each a representation of an individual and, more, each an attempt to capture the quality of that living encounter. They are not uniformly successful, but it would be extraordinary if they were. Exceptionally, many of them are very successful as portraits and all of them have a vibrant urgency about them.
The project has other resonances as well, as indicated by the title. It is in a sense a portrait of the gallery in terms of the people who intersect with it on one level or another, as friends, artists, collectors, journalists or interested observers. As such, apart from its considerable individual merits, it makes up a fascinating body of work.
Reviewed
• Restoration: Ilkka Halso, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until July 24th (01-6708055)
• Mark Garry, Tony Swain, Andrew Vickery, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until July 10th (01-6709093)
• Cara Thorpe, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until July 22nd (01-6617286)
• Audience: Mick O'Dea, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until July 24th (01-8740064)
