Reviewed:
Dermot Seymour, Goatscape, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until November 3rd (01-8740064)
Espen Eiborg, Cross Gallery until October 27th (01-4738978)
Marc Reilly, Saturation, Graphic Studio Gallery until October 20th (01-6798021)
In the past, Dermot Seymour was often asked to explain the everyday surrealism of his paintings depicting Northern Ireland. In this work he devised a harsh pictorial realm in which military technology co-existed with farmyard animals and offbeat details, like the trout caught in a barbed wire fence, seemed fraught with symbolic significance. But the oddities and incongruities, he was fond of pointing out, were factual. It may have been strange, but it was certainly true.
While true, the symbolism still held: herd-like masses, and the fish out of water may even have been the artist himself, a perplexed observer of a world out of joint. More recently Seymour, long resident in Co Mayo, has shed the involved narratives of his earlier work. A 1989 painting, On the Balcony of the Nation, depicted a cow, tagged and teetering on the edge of a crumbling precipice.
There was a sense of being at the edge of a precarious Ireland at the edge of a precarious Europe.
In his latest show, Goatscape at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, the animals are not so vulnerably positioned. They stand four-square on the ground, they have convincing heft, they cast shadows and, with the exception of one poor cow, they look pretty healthy. All the same, each exists in isolation and while the picture titles link animals inextricably and pointedly to the landscape, the backgrounds, mostly dark, are curiously undifferentiated and vague compared to the lovingly rendered coats of the animals themselves.
They still, reasonably enough, have an air of suffering on our behalf. His goat is a - rather insolent looking, it must be said - relation of William Holman Hunt's Scapegoat. Goats, though, have the reputation of being temperamental creatures, and the bovine helplessness and compliance suggested by that one sickly cow, the Consuming Unit of Brass, is untypical of the show as a whole. Rather we are faced with truculent bulls and mischievous pigs. Even the Bogewe looks as if it's inclined to answer back. As with Martin Gale, the hard, assertive realism of Seymour's style seems thoroughly appropriate to contemporary rural Ireland.
Espen Eiborg's paintings at the Cross Gallery are sombre, textural works that suggest an elemental engagement with landscape, though they are not necessarily landscapes per se. Thule, which most closely resembles the paintings he showed here last year, is also the most landscape-like piece. In it, a vast, simmering red sky looms over a grey, gritty foreground. Eiborg may resist the idea, but the stark, almost apocalyptic image seems to harken back to the fierce, wintry world of the old Nordic sagas, something that comes up again and again in his work.
The largest piece in the show, Sherpa, doesn't offer us any kind of space to enter at all. It resembles, in fact, a number of animal hides stitched together to form a large sheet that might be used as a tent or some other form of shelter. Although it is actually made of paper, hung on the wall, burnished and roughly textured, it has a leatherly, defensive air about it, as though it is built to withstand the elements, and us.
In two series of much smaller works, Eiborg explores two basic pictorial methods. One series consists of stitched, painted segments forming tightly constructed patchwork compositions, the other consists of paintings in a more conventional sense - though they do incorporate additional layers of fabric, ragged-edged panels glued to their surfaces and painted over (Eiborg likes to have something to work against in his picture surfaces). The blocky forms of the latter works have an earthy, intractable quality about them, again recalling an old world of myths and gods, with deep shadows and bursts of incandescent light.
Marc Reilly's last show, at the Paul Kane Gallery, featured a beautiful, uncompromising group of large colour-field paintings, each a single colour. There was an amorphous, atmospheric quality to the surfaces. Now, with his fine show at the Graphic Studio Gallery, Saturation, he continues his exploration of this colour world through the medium of print. He describes the 25 prints as being "inspired by glimpses of particular moments of colour, or the memory of an occasion of colour a long time ago."
In a way that sounds like Howard Hodgkin's pictorial prescription: an imaginative evocation in colour of some remembered place or event. But Hodgkin's paintings are rarely monochromatic and often feature intense concentrations of several strong colours and, most of the time at any rate, Reilly, as with his paintings, distils his recollections down to one or occasionally two hues. It's a sort of anti-Proustian approach. Rather than opening up an encyclopedic wealth of recollection with the key of one remembered detail, Reilly refines the complexity of experience into one chromatic essence, recollected in tranquillity.
It is in a way a high-risk strategy, because if he cannot imbue each work with a significant level of intensity the whole thing will fall flat. So the delicate pink flush of Kitchen Table - Dawn - Summerville, or the strong violet of Callery Bog, Evening have to do a lot of work. And generally they do. Oddly enough, it is when he gives himself more room for manoeuvre that things become slightly problematic. Acid Cabinet Green St East is a very nice print, but its blue cloud floating against a red ground reminds one of Rothko rather than anything else. But this is, overall, an extremely good exhibition and, while the prints are fine individually, they are definitely best seen en masse.
