Reviewed: Charlie Whisker: Elected Silence, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, ended on Wednesday (01-6794237); David Quinn: The Far Garden, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, ends tomorrow (01-8740064);Christine Bowen & Mark Adlington: From The Waters And The Wild, Origin Gallery, Dublin, ends on July 4th (01-4785159); Brian Bourke: Women Giving Birth To Men, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, ended on Saturday (01-6766055).
It's always dark in the imaginative world evoked in Charlie Whisker's exhibition Elected Silence. In fact it's always a long dark night of the soul. Figures are rare, though tellingly present on occasion. More commonly, as observers, we're put in the position of sitting, after midnight, brooding over an empty table.
Empty, that is, but for a few well-tried props: a glass of what might be whiskey, a packet of cigarettes, a matchbook, some pills, a CD case, a few mementoes of the past. But it's funny how, whether depicting a table top under the glow of electric light or the eerie vastness of the sea by night, Whisker's compositions are dominated by that central emptiness.
It is an ambiguous space. On the one hand there is an ominous quality to the way the elements of a composition will circulate around a central absence, a void. On the other the work is in part about being able to do something with this residual emptiness, perhaps about making something in the aftermath of loss or from the aftermath of loss. In one explicit figurative painting, The Killing Of Michael Browne, Whisker locates something in this otherwise empty space, and, not surprisingly, it turns out to be something terrible. He grew up in the North, and he has said the painting refers to the sectarian murder of a Belfast teenager, an event that he witnessed and that caused him much anguish and soul-searching.
It would be a mistake, though, to see the exhibition solely as relating to one dreadful event and its repercussions. Whisker's work reflects not just a personal memory but general truths about human experience and, in particular, about experience in a scarred, embittered place such as Northern Ireland. The Titanic as a symbol of the North, memories kept inadequately at bay, the business of coping with painful experiences of helplessness and loss - it is not a cheerful agenda, and there is an appropriately rough edge to a lot of the work. As ever, Whisker has a flair for vivid, oblique narrative.
As aficionados of his work will know, when Brian Bourke gets an idea he runs with it. He makes thematic series of paintings, drawings and sculptures with a fixed, resolute determination. Women Giving Birth To Men, which has just ended its run, gives a new twist to this process: the central piece is a single suite of about 40 individual pieces, most of which feature multiples of the show's central, startling image. This is of a stylised, wooden-doll-like female head and torso in the process of giving birth to a mature male, only the head of which is visible. Visible and looking, variously, bemused, irritable, weary, strained and surprised. By contrast the woman looks serene and untroubled. It is a strange image, allowing a fair degree of interpretative scope.
Although restricting himself to a severely repetitive format, Bourke has been exceptionally inventive in terms of pattern and colour, which is unusually bold, extending into fluorescent pigments. This applies individually, piece by piece, and to the work as a whole, an all-encompassing environment that is endlessly engaging for the eye. A series of related polychrome wooden sculptures are striking totems. Not for the first time, Bourke has made something remarkable and idiosyncratic.
In The Far Garden, David Quinn conjures up a world in which spaces and objects have an enhanced presence and clarity. The paintings describe a spare domain of rural domesticity, usually crisply defined by strong evening light. A cat sits on a chair, a mother holds her arms out for her child, a figure lingers. The spaces are comfortable, and the scenes without figures invite our habitation. Forms are simplified and blocky, as in Edward Hopper's paintings.
Where Hopper became adept at conveying the estrangement of urban living, and where a painter like Martin Gale captures aspects of the hardness and anxieties of contemporary rural Ireland, Quinn, who is based in Co Mayo, steers clear of dark undertones. There is a note of yearning in the show's title, and although there is an air of mystery to the images there is nothing essentially sinister. So much so, in fact, that they could easily come across as facile and sentimental, but somehow that doesn't happen. They are affirmative but also curiously detached and objective, icily precise.
Christine Bowen and Mark Adlington share the Origin Gallery for From The Waters And The Wild. Bowen's work relates to her exploration of accounts of St Gobnait and Inisheer. Gobnait is a patron saint of bee-keepers, and, using a simple shift dress as a metaphor for the figure, Bowen's mixed-media drawings explore dimensions of the saint's interaction with the natural world. It's a useful, flexible device that allows her to develop some fine images, and there is a nice, spontaneous quality to her drawings despite their careful conceptual framework.
Adlington is a more direct observer of wildlife and landscape. His studies of grey seals, a sea otter, seabirds and fish, together with views of the Kerry shoreline, are free and bold. He is clearly an attentive observer of wildlife, although some of the more finished animal studies from elsewhere that he includes are on the way to being formulaic wildlife art, for better or worse. Even so, he unfailingly gets a real sense of the animals.
