You may find there is something strangely familiar about much of the work in Louis le Brocquy's exhibition of Aubusson Tapestries at the Taylor Galleries. While all of them have been woven within the last three years by the award-winning master lissier Rene Duche, some of the designs have been around for quite a while longer than that - though not exactly in their present form.
For those familiar with le Brocquy's work, looking at them is a bit like meeting someone you know who has made some unremarked change in their appearance. You know they're different, but you just can't put your finger on what it is.
The clue is contained in le Brocquy's interest in the equivalence of colour and music in terms of emotional effect. In the early 1940s, he explored the potential correspondence between the chromatic scale and the "12 subdivisions of the primary colours." His painting, The Spanish Shawl, employs "major and minor `colour chords' for their emotional resonance". At the time he was much struck by a strange fact of colour perception: if you stare for a while at a given colour and then turn your gaze onto a plain white surface, your eye will produce an image not of the colour you've been studying, but of its exact complementary, its chromatic opposite.
Some years later, when he began designing tapestries, he used a technique learned from the renowned Jean Lurcat. Rather than making a colour sketch from which the weavers might work, Lurcat's approach was to make a precise linear cartoon in which every area is colour-coded by number - on the same principle as those painting-by-numbers hobby kits. Le Brocquy made linear cartoons for a number of tapestries and, as it happened, he turned out to have quite a flair for the medium.
Then, in the light of his earlier experiments with colour and music, and with the phenomenon of colour inversion very much in mind, he also made a second series of cartoons, identical to the first but replacing every colour and tone with its opposite, "as contrary as night from day," as he observes. But having made them: "I had to wait some 50 years before these colour-inverted cartoons could be woven at Aubusson".
It is immediately striking that the process of inversion preserves the integrity of the design and, it could well be argued, in a couple of cases even enhances it. The colour-inverted versions of Travellers, Garlanded Goat and Eden certainly give the original versions a good run for their money, all gaining in colour intensity and displaying novel ranges of beautiful, muted harmonies. The Goat is particularly strong, a real virtuoso display of colour and pattern design.
Mind you, the results can be more problematic. The new version of Adam and Eve in the Garden is distinctly quirkier in effect, perhaps because the first one hinges on a definite, boldly contrasting pattern of light and dark, rather than, as is usually the case, being primarily constructed from a set of colour relationships. That le Brocquy is still capable of doing exactly that is apparent in the altogether new tapestries in the show, including the luxuriant Ucello with its serene depiction of an orange tree laden with fruit.
In its management of myriad, similar forms, Ucello recalls the tapestries based on le Brocquy's celebrated illustrations for Thomas Kinsella's version of The Tain. The extraordinary Army Massing, with its spectacular evocation of countless hundreds of figures, works extremely well woven soft white against black. A number of individual figure compositions, while striking - and interesting in terms of seeing small, subtle gestures writ large - remain more rooted in their graphic origins. That is, they are more like conventional transpositions, whereas in his colour work there is absolutely no gap between the artist's creative impulse, his accumulated skills, and what we see on the wall.
Louis le Brocquy's Aubusson Tapestries can be seen at the Taylor Galleries, Kildare St, Dublin, until December 9th
