Stephen McKenna's exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery depicts a rural Ireland almost excessive in its accumulation of benign, attractive elements - at once odd and ordinary, beautiful and sad, making a connection with the idea of Arcadia
It's no reflection on the undoubted appeal of Co Carlow to note that the words Arcadia and Bagenalstown sit fairly oddly together. Arcadia evokes a long-lost natural idyll, a landscape of unspoilt natural beauty rather than 21st-century agribusiness, and it evokes classical Greece rather than provincial Ireland. For several years now, artist Stephen McKenna has been based in Bagenalstown. When he began to exhibit paintings based on the landscape in and around his studio, something he did not consciously have in mind came through in the work.
That was a sense of an ancient landscape overwritten by layer upon layer of human history, and of a culture that, though regarded as contemporary, had venerable roots and enduring rituals and patterns. Douglas Hyde Gallery director John Hutchinson was struck by the distinctive vision of rural Ireland - at once odd and ordinary, beautiful and sad - embodied in the paintings, and made a connection with the idea of Arcadia. The result is Et In Arcadia Ego, an exhibition devoted to McKenna's rural paintings. As it happens, it is augmented by sculptor Michael Warren's installation Amor Fati in the Hyde's Gallery 2, a strikingly complementary show.
The title of McKenna's show is taken from one of Nicholas Poussin's best-known and most-discussed works, The Arcadian Shepherds, which depicts a group of figures clustered around a tomb on which the inscription is carved. Poussin painted the subject twice. The agitation of the early version, which relates to a bald confrontation with death, gives way to the poise and calm of the second picture.
The inscription which is, first time around, generally interpreted as signifying the fact of death even in Arcadia, can be read in the context of the second work as the more meditative and wistful: "I too have dwelt in Arcadia". There is usually a note of disquiet in even the most serene of Poussin's beautiful classical landscapes, an intimation as ominous as the presence of the skull atop the tomb in the first version of The Arcadian Shepherds. In the exhibition's title painting, McKenna presents us with a vision of rural Ireland that is almost excessive in its accumulation of benign, attractive elements: a startling combination of diverse flowers in bloom, swans on the River Barrow, ordered fields, placidly grazing cattle and sheep, a mill, distant hills, all bathed in a mellow, gentle light.
In one corner, however, an Irish wolfhound chews on what could be a sizeable joint of raw meat, a sign which, taken with what might be described as the over-ripeness of the picture, suggests that something is awry in Arcadia, or with the very notion of Arcadia. "This view," he says of the painting, "does exist, with some transpositions." That is to say, the combination of plants and animals is engineered. But, as he points out: "while in that sense it is artificial, all paintings are artificial anyway".
The River Barrow, which features in many paintings, was one of the decisive factors that led him to stay in Bagenalstown. "Without the proximity of the river, I wouldn't have moved there. Not that river or even a river particularly, it could equally have been the sea. One or the other." The Six Bathers who are arranged in the shallows of the river - probably not a typical sight on the Barrow - are quoted from well-known paintings, including works by Ingres and Delacroix. Opposite them, two swans drift on the water. "It was interesting when John started looking at the paintings," McKenna recalls. "He spotted all sorts of relationships and interconnections that hadn't occurred to me, Leda and the Swan, for example."
His paintings often exude a palpable sense of learning to look at and depict the world. Their quality of patient, careful visual simplicity, which can come across as a kind of awkwardness, can either attract or alienate viewers. This body of work was, he says, "a return to learning to paint again - you have to do that every now and again". That is to say, for the previous three years or so, he'd painted still life. He then wanted to get back to painting figures. One of them, a farmer standing in a field, is included in the present show.
"I certainly never set out to paint Bagenalstown as Arcadia. I still wouldn't do that. The only programmatic idea associated with this work was a desire to paint people doing typical things, the standard activities of life." Hence the farmer. "Men stand in fields. But I would say that the idea of Arcadia has always fascinated me. In the 1980s, I painted a another picture with the title Et in Arcadia Ego. It was of a large fish in a small bowl. That may sound extremely pessimistic, but this work is not gloomy, it's not pessimistically intended. I do enjoy the countryside."
HE is wary, in other words, of the paintings being interpreted as being ironic or insincere. "I think the time for irony in painting has passed. There was a period when you couldn't introduce the idea of beauty in a painting without being knowing or ironic. But irony is a funny term. In its original Greek sense, it meant pretending not to know what you do know."
If he offers an account of the landscape, Michael Warren's work can be seen in relation to the tomb in Poussin's painting. A waist-high, white block, square if viewed from above, it has an assertive presence in the Douglas Hyde's small, enclosed second gallery. In fact, it echoes the proportions of the gallery, being entirely designed along the principle of the golden section in relation to its setting. There is one oddity to the geometric block, and that is the way it seems to bulge, as though expressing the notion of releasing a form from stone. It also refers to the notion of perfection, of the search for the ideal, implying that it is an impossible goal, and bidding us to accept things the way they are: Arcadia in Bagenalstown, for example.
Et in Arcadia Ego and Amor Fati are at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until March 29th (01-6081116)
