First performed in 1974, Tom Stoppard's Travesties is a dazzling comedy that hinges on the simultaneous presence in a Zurich library of the British consul, Lenin, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and James Joyce. A decade or so later the Irish painter Micheal Farrell, an exile in another of Joyce's European cities, Paris, began to devise his own, pictorial version of Travesties.
Inspired by an anecdote concerning the coincidental presence at the Cafe de Flore of Joyce and Picasso, he made a number of works imaginatively reconstructing the moment. But the idea took on a life of its own, and he went on to include, in various contexts, Marcel Proust and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in a series of ingenious and playful images. Appropriately, a number of these form the heart of Joycesight, currently showing at the Taylor Gallery.
Organised by the George Moore Society to mark the Joyce Centennial and the Annual Joyce Symposium in Rome 1998, the show has already toured Italy, visited Galway and will go on to Paris. The idea is simple, and effective, drawing together work by nine artists whose work intersects on some level with Joyce and his writings. Besides Farrell's engaging inventions, there are of course a group of Louis le Brocquy's ghostly portrait heads of the writer, which both distance and humanise him.
There are fewer pieces by the remaining artists, including a very good study of gulls in the air, plus some sensitive Dublin landscapes by Anne Donnelly, a dark Anna Livia by Barrie Cooke, Brian Bourke's good-natured set of portraits, a beautiful 1975 Camille Souter study of Poolbeg Power Station, and two contrasting heads by sculptors Conor Fallon and Brian King - whose piece is, oddly enough, an entirely conventional portrait bust, while Fallon's three-dimensional drawing, with its complex network of planes and hollows, gets inside the head of the subject.
In the catalogue Brian Fallon elaborates informatively on the problematic relationship between visual artists and Joyce. It's interesting that, as we approach the end of the century, Farrell's densely iconographic Cafe de Flore and related works increasingly stand out as a significant bid to deal imaginatively with the mythology of Joyce and Irish identity.
Aidan McDermott, exhibiting at the Rubicon, is one of a number of younger painters whose work highlights traditional skills but gives them a contemporary twist. His show is called Morphic Heads and it consists of 17 meticulously painted images of strange, caricaturish heads. They are drawn from clay sculptures he made himself. He cites Pinocchio as a source of inspiration - "the notion of a physical manifestation of an emotional state". Hence the exaggerated features - the bulbous noses, furrowed brows and massive chins. There's even an extended nose.
The physiognomy of Mc Dermott's characters recalls the work of English-born painter, Peter Howson, who devised a pictorial allegory of a dark, nightmarish Britain inhabited by a race of brutish creatures. But Howson gave himself more room for manoeuvre than McDermott, who shackles himself to a restrictive and repetitious formula for no obviously compelling reason. He situates his invented characters in static isolation against very stylised backgrounds. Conceptually, he might have been better advised to, for example, photograph his clay figures, and hence play on their strangely lifelike quality. Technically he is a very accomplished painter: he is trying to do something ambitious, but this work does not display his strengths to his advantage.
Hector McDonnell, meanwhile, at the Solomon Gallery, is a bit like a time traveller. He paints as if he is a Victorian painter who has been transported to the modern world and sets about recording everything around him. He is an omnivorous observer, ever hungry for detail. In fact, he is too undiscriminating, like someone let loose with a camera - and the camera is a big influence on the way he frames his images, whether because he uses one, or because that's the way we tend to look at the world now - except of course that he has to do rather more than point and press the shutter-release. Each of his images is very laboriously built up by hand, dramatically so in the case of the busy Manhattan streetscapes.
He has a tendency to overwork his pictures, perhaps because of his frenetic, jittery brushwork, which at times becomes a slightly obtrusive mannerism. But, to his credit, he also puts himself on the line, time and again facing up to difficult subjects, dealing with the visible world in all its messy complication. In the end, he is always a likable painter, one who wins you over despite your doubts, but he could be a much better one if he indulged himself a little less.
There is one piece in Peter Jones's show at Green on Red that particularly stands out. Bishop's Red Hat Field Shape I features mirrored arcs that meet to form the shape of the title. They are both red against a white ground and the print could be an Ellsworth Kelly. In fact, it is a sort of Ellsworth Kelly tribute. It's the first piece that greets you as you enter the gallery and nothing else you see quite matches it for clarity, elegance and simplicity.
Jones teaches print, and his show is partly about the relatively obscure medium of collagraph, which is, as he demonstrates very vividly, capable of producing some rich, painterly effects in a way comparable to carborundum. Where there is colour it is strong, though pulled down a notch or two towards muddiness. The compositions are decorative abstractions inspired by physical features in the landscape, by the patterns of fields, the shapes of river courses, the textures of earth and crops.
Joycesight is at the Taylor Gallery until February 27th. Morphic Heads is at the Rubicon Gallery until February 27th. Hector McDonnell is at the Solomon Gallery until March 10th. Peter Jones is at the Green on Red Gallery until March 6th.
