THIS exhibition is mounted in the Clock Tower Building of Dublin Castle, earmarked for the Chester Beatty Collection, and it needs all the space of a wide, low ceilinged room to mount adequately the 13 large, oblong canvases included. The number may be significant but more likely is accidental since the series, called A Broken Sky, actually numbers 16 in all, three of which are left out - presumably for space reasons. They are hung without frames, and the effect is curiously like viewing a series of murals. (The Mexican painters of the 1930s would have appreciated it).
Pakenham's paintings are an anguished, honest, bitter gut reaction to the violence in which the North has lived for a quarter of a century. They are raw in style and raw in subject matter, crammed with imagery of violence, sex, angry altercation and scenes of urban dereliction. There are obvious parallels with the lurid, simplistic approach of Eighties New Expressionism, but a closer parallel is with the recent Scottish school, which has mixed the mood of the Apocalypse with an aggressively sour view of modern industrial society. The Scottish painters were obviously influenced by Beckmann and certain other Germans of between the wars, and there is more than a hint too of Beckmann in Pakenham's imagery.
These are not subtle or aesthetically pleasing works; they are as direct and aggressive as newspaper cartoons, flaunting their topicality and socio political message in your face. There is even an element of street graffiti about them, almost the kind of "folk art" which you might expect to find daubed in certain back streets of Belfast or Derry. Not only do they indict the violent factions who have treated human life on both sides as something dispensable; they also satirise the double thinkers, smooth talkers and professional jargoneers who have helped to prolong misery instead of curing it.
The faults are obvious, notably a lack of underlying pictorial architecture, a rather scrubby paint surface, and a tendency towards overcrowding and overstatement. On, their own unaesthetic terms, however, these big canvases succeed because they hit hard at legitimate targets and have an obvious, almost painful sincerity and relevance. Thousands of ordinary people in Northern Ireland, no doubt, can see their collective plight mirrored in them.
