Orla Whelan: Coloured into Shape
Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin
★★★★☆
Orla Whelan’s geometric abstractions may seem straightforward and direct on first inspection, but this guise of immediacy evaporates when you take a moment and observe more closely. What appear to be technical executions of pattern – where the shapes, lines and axes are calibrated with mathematical precision – are revealed to be imperfect, hand-painted blocks of colour.
Without rulers, straight edges or any other specialist tool, Whelan creates a kaleidoscopic array of angular constructions. From a distance they seem cool, mechanical, but up close the imprinted signs of the painter’s manual technique soften the planes of each composition. Lines are blurred and uneven, and while many images conjure the impression of symmetry, they are almost all visited by irregular structures and fields. And Whelan’s canvases are made from linen, which is a coarse, homespun material.
The result is a kind of mental double vision, where two shows appear at the same time: close one eye and you see a single aesthetic; close the other and you see something completely different. Or, to put it another way, the duality of the artworks’ aesthetic entails a process of phenomenological disclosure and return. This Janus logic is at work even in the collection of rocks in the backmost room: what appear to be synthetic items from afar, deliberately sculpted and dyed, are in reality large raw mineral deposits that the artist found and preserved for their impressive complexions: they are both ornamental objects and naturally occurring sedimentary material.
Most of Coloured into Shape consists of two series; the larger belong to the Earthshine collection, whereas the smaller paintings are numbered under the title Moon, Valley, Dew, Death. The naturalist connotations of these names, which evoke a kind of ecospiritualism or Romantic worldview, further heightens the tension at the heart of the work, raising the temperature of its visual and psychological contrasts. Both series predate this exhibition: the Moon, Valley, Dew, Death works are a long-standing preoccupation, stemming from 2016, while Whelan premiered her Earthshine works at an exhibition in April this year.
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Walking from one end of the Hillsboro Fine Art gallery to the next, I’m struck by the resemblance these compositions bear to the rainbow-like patterns emitted when light is split by lenses or prisms. Visual manifolds like these invoke not only the science of perception and optics but also 1970s psychedelia, such as the artwork of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (both of which were released in 1973, only two years before the artist was born).
The double-sided character of Coloured into Shape is hardly surprising, given Whelan’s preoccupation with identity – the artist has a background in philosophy, after all, and the meaning of abstract metaphysical concepts clearly appeals. Whelan is well known for her playful interrogation of the indivisibility of the self: copies of a poem “written in response to the exhibition” by Rana Howell are provided at the entrance to the gallery; the discerning will note that the poet’s name is an anagram of the artist’s.
All that being said, the conceptual or cerebral elements of Whelan’s work need not occupy you, if that is not to your taste. The truth is that Whelan is a superior painter: her compositions are arresting explorations of colour and form, conducted with a masterly eye, by an artist who has honed her practice over several decades.
Coloured into Shape is at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, until Saturday, October 12th
