When John Noel Smith moved to Berlin 22 years ago, he found the space to consider what it is to be Irish - but, despite success in northern Europe, he never severed his Irish ties. Now, as his two shows open in Dublin, Aidan Dunne assesses Smith's work
A painter newly returned to Ireland after 22 years in Berlin, John Noel Smith is a strong, compact figure with close-cropped hair and an aura of contained, coiled-up energy. Looking on as his work is unpacked at the Gallagher Gallery for his 10-year survey exhibition, the first of a Nissan Art Project series, he is intense, slightly nervous; a forceful presence. A fast talker who explains his paintings in fragmentary, staccato bursts of speech, he shoots you interrogatory glances to make sure you're getting the point. But his attention is more on the paintings than the explanations.
He regards a sequence of five widely disparate works that might be said to summarise the show. Five Spaces offers a whistle-stop tour through his painterly lexicon of the past 10 years and more, from an overtly geometric abstract to a disconcertingly realistic portrait of a figure in a bathrobe looking at a painting.
"OK, they are different, but in fact there are all kinds of connections. This pattern here recurs. The towel is echoed in the knots.
This panel is equivalent to that one turned through 90 degrees . . . But don't worry about all that, just let them sink in visually." It's as if he's fast-forwarding through some of the thought processes that contributed to their making, reluctantly - but most of all he wants you to just look at them, to relish them, to let them do their job.
That's because he is, first and foremost, a painter. His work is rich in symbolism and ideas, to the extent that it is like an ongoing, impassioned dialogue with the viewer, it draws you in and engages you in arguments, but time and again he returns to the idea that the level of engagement that matters is the primary, visual level. As a naturally gifted, bravura painter, he relishes the sensuous physicality of oil paint, and it is as if he can never quite get over the fact that painting is allowed. It is an unexpected bonus, a supplement to seeing in the way that writing is often regarded as a supplement to speech. Face-to-face with his work, he seems to say, you've got to trust your eyes. Oh, and by the way, as his work also implies, you can't trust your eyes.
Smith was born in Dublin in 1952. His father's family were from Gorey in Co Wexford and he was sent to school in St Peters in Wexford. After that he went to the Dún Laoghaire School of Art, in the early 1970s, when there happened to be a real buzz about the place. He had an appetite for life and work that verged on impatience - and still does. In Dublin, he was making fairly austere, monochrome abstracts, based on the square, that folded up and compacted the picture plane. They were obviously flat, but as you moved in front of them, successive, folded layers were suggested.
He felt that the mood in Dublin at the time was against painting, as people revelled in the possibilities of new art forms. But he wanted to paint, and at an ambitious level. Then he won the Alice Hammerschlag Travel Award and visited Berlin.
That was a prelude to a scholarship, a Deutsche Akademisher Austauschdient, or DAAD, in 1980. He did a four-month German language course, and then: "I went to Berlin for two years and stayed for 22 - a life sentence."
Berlin was more open and cosmopolitan; he felt he could get on with what he wanted to do more freely. "It was a relatively small international city then. After unification, it became a bigger, more Germanic city, though it's changing again." In Berlin, he eventually showed regularly with a major commercial gallery, Folker Skulima, and later with Galerie Volker Diehl.
He also exhibited extensively in Scandinavia, with Leger Gallery and Gallery 16 in Sweden, and several galleries in Denmark. But he exhibited only sporadically back in Ireland, though he was always keen to maintain contact and had exhibitions at the then Royal Hospital Kilmainham and Temple Bar. Then, in 1997, he was taken on by the Green on Red Gallery.
Initially, in Berlin, he made colour versions of his "folded" spatial abstracts. In a sense, his work then developed in other directions. He embarked on several series of much more luxuriant, vibrantly coloured paintings, stylistically akin to Philip Guston, and featuring a succession of iconic motifs. For some time these motifs related very specifically to Ireland and Irishness: standing stones, sheela-na-gigs, round towers, whiskey, ingredients for an Irish stew, Vikings, the mythical Sweeney.
It was as if he had become a stereotypical cultural émigré, thinking home thoughts from abroad, although thoughts characterised not so much by nostalgia as critical distance.
It is no exaggeration to say that this line of work was pursued to the point of ferocious disintegration in the late 1980s, in paintings that nod in passing towards Jack B. Yeats.
There is something positively disturbing about the level of internal discord in this phase of Smith's painting, but within the confines of a picture, he was never one to take prisoners.
Yet, against the odds, what happened throughout the 1990s was an expansive, surprisingly mellow re-emergence of his spatial concerns from the 1970s, something that quite surprised him.
WHILE the symbolically charged icons he painted had all the concentration, centrality and material extravagance of the devotional icon paintings of early Christian art, it is notable that, like those icons, they were individual constituents of symbolic families. Like the ingredients for an Irish stew, each was a link in a chain that made up a recognisable whole, an overall vision of culture, history and identity. The paintings were, in other words, piecemeal examinations of the symbolic networks that came to preoccupy him in the 1990s.
Looking at the evolution of the paintings since, it seems as if these networks, visualised as grids of various kinds, Knots, Palimpsests chain mail, ogham, even rib cages and lacerations, are synonymous with the spaces referred to in Five Spaces.
That is, space in the paintings is actually constituted by what was previously treated as motif. There is a sly hint at how this is so in another new painting, a diptych, Madonna, Icon, Wormhole, (the iconic Madonna is a head-and-shoulders portrait of his wife, Monika).
One of the questions at the heart of contemporary theoretical physics is an apparently simple one: what does space consist of? The reason for this is that the notion of space as simply nothing, infinitely divisible, runs into problems. There are specific, sometimes mischievous references to physical theory in some of Smith's titles, including, here, the notion of wormholes that putatively connect different points in space and time. While his paintings are not concerned solely with physical conceptions of space, he clearly likes the idea that space has a structure, and this equates to other kinds of space that we inhabit.
In other words, we live within various kinds of overlapping, interconnecting, related spaces apart from physical space - including linguistic, historical, cultural, class, and familial spaces. These spaces might seem to be as transparent and neutral as physical space but, like it, they turn out to have a grain, a structure. And the significance of various symbolic networks for Smith is not the specific meaning that might be conveyed within each, but precisely that each is a network of symbolic meaning, a space in itself.
As it happens, his wife, Monika, is German, and in Five Spaces she stands apart from the network of Irish shamrock-like knots in the painting she looks at. She is outside the network. In fact, she is doubly apart in that she is one kind of painting looking at another kind of painting, a representation looking at an abstraction. In Berlin, Smith as an outsider found that his implicit, invisible Irishness became visible. He too could stand apart and assess it. Painting is the space, the breathing space, in which this can happen.
One of the references for Monika as Madonna is Hans Holbein's full length portrait of Christina of Denmark, which hangs in London's National Gallery. Smith has always liked the portrait - and the subject.
"You know that story? Holbein originally did a drawing so that Henry VIII could see her likeness. He wanted to marry her, and she said: If I had two heads I'd gladly give the King one of them." She was a member of European royalty, but she knew her own breathing space depended on retaining a necessary distance.
John Noel Smith's Nissan Art Project Exhibition is at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Ely Place, Dublin, until October 20th. John Noel Smith, New Paintings is at Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street, Dublin, until October 5th
