VISUAL ART:YOU CAN depend on Charles Tyrrell. Like one of those protagonists in Howard Hawks's films who pride themselves on their professionalism come what may, you know he's going to get the job done without any fuss or bluster. The only problem about being dependable is that people can begin to take you for granted and forget just how good you are.
If you want to check how good Tyrrell is you can do no better than drop into the Taylor Gallery to see his current show of paintings and etchings. It would be wrong to reproduce an image, because it simply wouldn’t do justice to the physical fabric of the work, which is as good as anything he’s ever done. And he doesn’t settle for doing again what he knows he can do well: every piece is charged with the nervous tension of discovery. He’s dedicated the show to the memory of Jim O’Driscoll SC, who died recently and who was an enthusiastic, perceptive collector and, as Tyrrell notes, a true friend to Irish artists.
Tyrrell is a exemplar of what Gerhard Richter termed “the daily practice of painting”. One senses that his life revolves around the routine of the studio. Each piece he produces has the feeling of having been subjected to exacting scrutiny, of having been looked at and reworked until any doubts or obviousness have been left behind.
Whatever remains has more than earned its place. One could also say he proceeds with logical rigour but, while there is a certain amount of logic involved, at the same time there is something odd and incalculable about what makes a painting a painting, about reaching the point where it becomes seriously interesting and involving, and Tyrrell is clearly open to the inexplicable and the intuitive. To quote Richter again, painting doesn’t involve thinking, as such, it’s “like a substitute for thinking – a different way of thinking”. Tyrrell’s show includes oils on canvas, some quite large, oils on aluminium, and a group of etchings. His characteristic way of approaching a painting, a drawing or an etching could be described as algorithmic, in that he applies certain given, simple rules, relating to divisions, boundaries, patterns and forms, to the application of paint or line, and then sets about working and reworking the surface according to this given methodology. The surface acquires a history, even when layers are scraped away or dissolved. Variations appear along the way, and so do arbitrary departures from the rules. Rather than becoming exhausted from the cumulative process, the surface progresses towards an intense, overall liveliness.
Some years ago, Tyrrell obliquely acknowledged the influence of his physical surroundings on his work. This is significant, because he was generally, and plausibly, regarded as being an abstract painter, and because he lives and works at the edge of the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, a dramatic location that is starkly exposed to the weather and to the sea. Without any explicit evocation, the weather, the sea, immense spaces, the passage of hours and days, sunsets and sunrises, life being lived, attentiveness to the moment, all make themselves felt in the work. This is so most evidently, though not necessarily more tellingly, in some of the oils on aluminium, their spaces divided by lines and arcs of light, and in the beautiful etchings with their rhythmic, stratified bands of hatching and cross-hatching. Given his record, the bar is set pretty high, but this work represents a painter at the top of his form, as good as anyone currently working you care to mention, nationally and internationally.
SHEILA RENNICK'S Dodgy Heaven, at the Ashford Gallery, is a very likeable show in its own nicely twisted, jaundiced, subversive way. In I am a CAT, for example, she successfully makes the formidable imaginative leap into the mind of said cat. It's a cat with attitude, but then cats have attitude, that's the whole point of them. Each of Rennick's paintings is like a short story. She zeroes in on an incident, a character (human as well as animal), or a mood, and lets it blossom and unfold in the space of the canvas, elaborated in thick, clotted masses of luscious if distinctly curdled oil pigment.
She is mischievous and relishes that curdled quality, the way sweet colours turn sour through sheer excess and, comparably, the way dreams turn sour when they are realised, chiefly because they are completely mad. Time and again in her paintings there is a sense of the cruel disjuncture between the subjective idea or self-image and the startling reality. Generally the smaller works fare best, the larger pictures looking a bit starved of resources – of the necessary excess, in fact. But she is certainly onto something and one looks forward to the next instalment.
ROBERT ARMSTRONG'S SHOW at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Blimp on the Horizon, is a tour de force of pitch-perfect painting. In his last exhibition, Armstrong looked to the artists of the early Renaissance and to the old masters, lighting on aspects of background and mise en scènethat we overlook because they are peripheral to the main points of the pictures but which, excerpted, enlarged and reworked, turned out to be strange, revealing and compelling.
Since then, he has widened the scope of his observations, looking to the early Renaissance again and also much further afield, to the inexhaustible image bank opened up by the world wide web. His treatment has also evolved. While the overwhelming preoccupation of early Renaissance painting was biblical, Armstrong has obviated this central concern and imagined what might pertain in its absence: a flare of natural gas takes the place of celestial flames. Time and again the brutal reality of human industry usurps the transcendent promise of religious doctrine, heaven on earth had become hell. Not that he is pining for a paradise lost: the dominant tone is one of judicious skepticism.
Makiko Nakamura’s paintings at the Peppercanister Gallery are also impeccably judged. She is well established as a maker of polished, grid-based abstractions. The underlying concerns have to do with time and memory, and there is an austere lyricism to Nakamura’s treatment of emotionally charged material. It’s strikingly evident in this show, because, though she is strongly identified with the use of black and white, here she employs a range of relatively luxuriant hues to great effect in intricately rhythmic compositions.
Charles Tyrrell – paintings and etchings. Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare Street Until April 25
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Dodgy Heaven– candy-coloured narratives in paintings by Sheila Rennick. Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin. Until April 23
Robert Armstrong – recent paintings. Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin Until April 25 Makiko Nakamura – grid-based abstract paintings. Peppercanister Gallery, 3 Herbert Street, Dublin Until April 25
