Appropriately, two of Barry Flanagan's big bronze Hares, brandishing drums, guard the entrance to this year's RHA Annual Exhibition at the RHA Gallagher Gallery. Anarchic, unpredictable spirits, at something like eight feet tall, they are a dangerous looking pair, and they might as well be drumming out the old and in the new. Perhaps that's an over-simplification. The old academy, as represented by Tom Ryan or Desmond Carrick is still there (and quite rightly), but the gradual move towards incorporating not just a younger generation but a broader vision of painting and sculpture becomes more apparent every year and now looks pretty irreversible.
Flanagan's work is one indication, as is the presence of other guests, including Scottish painter Barbara Rae, and Terry Frost. But it's not enough to spice things up with a few guest appearances, and the Academy has long been aware of that. There are some real Irish surprises as well, including Michael Canning, Gwen O'Dowd and Cathy Carman, and there is now a solid presence of new school academicians like Martin Gale and Mick O'Dea, together with long-established artists whose work would not previously have been at home in the annual, people like Tony O'Malley, Nancy Wynne-Jones or Sean McSweeney. But a real sign of changing times is that fact that the showpiece portrait, of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, is by a younger artist, James Hanley. It's a rather harsh, unsympathetic study, with hard, intense light and crisp detailing. In other words, Hanley has sacrificed nothing of his personal style for the project.
Martin Gale is represented in strength. His pictures include the remarkable Man Leaving, with its typical, moody ambiguity. There's a very ambitious landscape, Benwee Head by Nick Miller, a vertiginous view of the headland. Up close the foreground greens look spongy and uncertain, but as you draw back the logic of the picture becomes clear, and it possesses great immediacy, particularly in the cloudy jumble of the sky. It's good to see Colin Harrison, an extremely capable artist, exhibiting.
There is a wonderful T.P. Flanagan oil, Lagan Towpath in Memory of Tom Carr, a brilliant evocation of water and vegetation. Veronica Bolay's Less than a Track, an old trail across open ground, is not only a good picture but encapsulates the spirit of her work generally in the way it delicately evokes the barely visible. Charles Harper seems to be getting seriously enamoured of landscape, albeit treated in his own cool, analytical way. Anita Shelbourne's Wandering Cat, and Early Morning Snow are nice examples of her style. There are fine landscapes by Eithne Jordan, Nancy Wynne-Jones, Eithne Carr, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Cherry Turpin - a nice, dark rhythmic watercolour study - and Valerie Hannan's small landscape etchings are always good. Barbara Warren has a fine drawing of Celbridge. David Lilburn shows one of his intriguing personal maps of Limerick.
There's a very effective sculpture by Melanie le Brocquy, The Fallen I, which is in essence a small, very eloquent classical figure. Olivia Musgrave's small bronze of Europa also stands out. Jack Donovan shows a surprisingly free, and pretty good painting. There's moody realism from Mark Shields. Besides his customary footballers, Joseph O'Connor shows a very good head study. Cherith McKinstry and Neil Shawcross are dependable as ever on colour. James Savage, by contrast, is strong on black and white in a big, atmospheric drawing. Tribute is paid to two late academicians, Patrick Hickey and Tom Carr. The sheer quantity of the RHA Annual is overwhelming, that's part and parcel of the event, as is the inclusion of quirky oddities, for it has a broad appeal. The trick is for it to evolve without shedding its audience.
ROBERT Armstrong's paintings, at the Hallward Gallery, are filtered through a veil of representation. A small image on the cover of an accompanying mini-catalogue reproduces a photograph of, presumably, the painter at the smoking rim of a volcanic crater in the Aeolian Islands, the source of his imagery. His smoky, sulphurous paintings are based on volcanoes, where nature wipes the slate clean and starts afresh, reducing what we conventionally think of as landscape to its raw ingredients: molten rock, minerals, vaporised water, ash. Armstrong proceeds to distance this extreme case of reality by using as references images captured from video. So that we see paintings of processed images that are in themselves partial, oblique views.
The largest work, Eolie, is a beautifully subtle composition, pale, close-toned and chiefly grey, with gentle intimations of yellow and blue. In some of the other large pieces, it is as if he is working up the nerve to do what he does here: to dispense with the habitual props of painterly effects, of compositional structure. Cloud, smoke, ash and powdery sulphur, with an occasional glimpse of Mediterranean blue, these are the elements at work, nothing settled into a solid, stable form, just glimpses of flux. Armstrong is a good colourist who has previously been known for using strong colour in paintings relating to gardens and landscape. Here he steps back from strong colours, and from the strong contrasts of his pond pictures, to explore the infinite subtlety of grey. But don't underestimate the richness of these recent paintings. They're not as obvious, but they are as rewarding, and Eolie could well be an important work in terms of his overall development.
Shades of Luc Tuymans in Stephen Brandes' Guinea Pigs at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. He abstracts figures from their context in art history and history - the five wives of Henry VIII, for example - and relocates them as curiously vacant presences in a vague, indeterminate space, floating against a neutral ground. They share this ground with quirky patterns based on motifs like pills or blobs. The effect is suggestive of identities drained of substance, reduced to iconic silhouettes, disembodied and consigned to a kind of virtual space. It's engaging stuff, but perhaps a little too slickly finished.
The 169th RHA Annual Exhibition is at the Gallagher Gallery until May 15th. Robert Armstrong is at the Hallward Gallery until RO] April 29th. Stephen Brandes is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until April 25th.
