"THE atmosphere of the bog seems to permeate Helen O'Toole's recent paintings, says the review by James Yood in Artforum. "It is in her attitude to nature that O'Toole finds the surest metaphor for her conception of Irishness, and in these avowedly romantic canvases she indulges a passion for textured tenebrism suggestive of ineradicable sorrow.
Textured tenebrism, begob. Hello, here's more of same. Tin hats on, lads. "No specific place is represented in O'Toole's work; indeed it is usually impossible to distinguish land, sky and water from each other.
Mmm. Sounds an interesting painting, this, rather like my own modest daubs, in which I can effortlessly make a reindeer look like a nuclear power plant. Hello, more on the way. Heads down, lads.
Pagan Pilgrimages is a painterly immersion in a cosmology of nature... [its] largely dark, greenish brown atmosphere is pierced by areas of creamy yellow light. Here and there O'Toole introduced just enough bits of pure colour - touches of red, blue and pink - to hint at a liveliness now etiolated and made sombre, an intensity now diffused and absorbed into larger moodier whirlpools."
Heads down
Phew. All right, boys, it seems to have passed for the moment. Nothing like the moody whirl pools, I always find, to scare the bejasus out of the troops. Oops, heads down. "In Expulsion at dawn . . . rhythmic rivulets of gestures pour across O'Toole's space with a terrible indistinctness."
Terrible indistinctness, eh? If it's terrible indistinctness you want, I'm the man for you. Terrible indistinctness is my middle name. "What's that? A horse cantering across a bog during a Connemara sunset?" "No. A portrait of St Patrick's Cathedral at high noon." "Terribly indistinct, isn't it?" "Most kind of you to say so.
"Abstract forces of nature as well as sweeping universal currents are posited as subtending patterns of existence and then transformed into a parallel world of paint O'Toole seeks to discover and expose a kind of risky equivalence, a nervous balance of pictorial forces that remains precarious. Light and dark areas achieve unreconciled saturations, forever gliding into each other, existing in an elliptical relationship not unlike that between land and sky."
Oh this is grand stuff I can bear you lapping it up and baying for more, though a little earlier on we were told it was impossible to distinguish between land and sky. No matter. Anything with subtending patterns of existence can't be bad at all.
Vibratory emotions
"Tones become shards of ambiguous vibratory emotions, delightful even when subsumed in multiple media. Echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paints surges towards mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit. This results in a world both deeply felt and surprisingly sweet and dour in imitations of a place in which faith and doubt become forced companions, inevitably nourishing one another."
In a world which is sweet and dour? What, like the chicken? And as for tones becoming shards of ambiguous vibratory emotions, delightful even when subsumed in multiple media, all I can say is: Where's my special chow me in? And after you with the soy sauce.
Actually there is no reason, according to the canons of what is called modern art, why should not frame my special chow mein and be called a major artist, challenging the existing parameters of critical awareness and at the cutting edge of creative endeavour, with my noodles and fried egg forever gliding into each other, existing in an elliptical relationship not unlike that between land and sky.
I make no comment upon Helen O'Toole's works, not having seen them, though since she has apparently framed the review from which the above examples of textured impenetrabile were taken beside her exhibition at the AIB in Castlebar, one may take it her paintings are of a piece with the review. If the nice people in AIB College Street even contemplate doing that to me, I'm off to join the TSB.
Ephemeral triteness
It is not necessary to go to Castlebar to sample the glories of textured tenebrism of modern art. You can do the same in Dublin. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is now a temple to, that ephemeral triteness called modern art, in which world being infected by AIDS is almost a declaration of artistic talent - there is an exhibition by the artist in residence, Bill Quinn, which largely consists of photographs of naked homosexual AIDS sufferers wearing condoms.
Now I will not be emotionally or politically bullied into accepting this as art. Grief unmediated by talent or skill and placed on public display as art is no more than exhibitionistic self indulgence. The marketable nature of exhibitionistic self indulgence was discovered and exploited by the high priest of modernism, Pablo Ruiz, better known as Picasso.
That creature was one of the great calamities of 20th century art. A man of sublime talent, he learned how profitable prostitutional frauds could be at an early age. I suspect that he realised he lacked the divine grace of the true artist. He was born in the epoch after the greatest flowering of artistic talent since the Renaissance. He lived in the shade of Impressionism, and in that shade perished.
He himself admitted failure. "The rich, the professional idlers desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied the critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. The less they understood, the more they admired me! Through amusing myself with all these farces, I became celebrated I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all . . . I am only a public clown, a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries.