Oscar Fouz Lopez: Tenets of Growing
Molesworth Gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
When you think of figurative painters, portraiture often comes to mind. If your taste leans towards classical art, then you may think of the Mona Lisa or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. If you have cultivated an interest in the artworks of the last century, then perhaps you recall Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits or Lucian Freud’s studies in corpulent excess.
But there is another tradition in figurative painting, one that doesn’t so much focus on the personality of its subject as render a moment of human drama tangible.
Such scenes have captured the visual imagination of painters since time immemorial, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that the Enlightenment thinker and art critic Denis Diderot coined the term “tableaux” to describe them. These paintings situate people in a dynamic environment. They imbue their subjects with narrative propulsion, creating the impression of an episode or chapter in an ongoing story.
Oscar Fouz Lopez’s work sits comfortably in this tradition. For contemporary audiences, his work might be compared with that of David Hockney, who is undoubtedly an influence: Lopez’s painting style has a similar glow, using colour and ambient landscape in a manner that recalls the English artist.
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This new exhibition is Lopez’s third for the Molesworth Gallery, a firm demonstration of the organisation’s belief in the integrity of his work. Originally from Spain, Lopez moved to Dublin in the late 2000s to study, completing a BFA and MFA here.
Though his years in Dublin were formative – he now lives in Vienna – the artist is clearly still under the spell of his homeland’s climate: all of his works are bathed in the radiant, orange-grove warmth of Mediterranean summer. In his first Molesworth exhibition, Light Catchers, his focus was night-time revelry: the artist conjured snapshots of a sprawling bacchanalia taking place at the boundary between forest and ocean. People sway and dance around flickering firepits, indifferent to the surreal apparitions of death that circle their innocent play.
Lopez’s new work in Tenets of Growing both develops and relinquishes some of the formal features of his earlier output: for the most part he abandons the touches of magical realism, and he has replaced oil paints with watercolours. Nor are the paintings visual fragments of a wider, unfolding event; instead they are individual affairs, discrete moments trapped in time. They appear more mature, as though the artist has grown in confidence; his style is looser, more spontaneous.
Lopez’s works nonetheless exhibit similar themes: a focus on joy and rejuvenation, epitomised here in the ample swatches of vegetation and flora that envelop his subjects. As the show’s title implies, the natural environment plays an important role in these tableaux. Lopez’s scenes are wonderfully low-key, as though the tranquillity of the plant life has rendered the people in the frame equally, dreamily calm.
Those few paintings that retain a surrealist acidity stage these elements to amplify the sense of a nurturing ecosystem; a particularly compelling composition, The Pull, depicts a stroll through a kingdom of sculptural outgrowths that is reminiscent of a thriving coral reef.
Tenets of Growing is at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, until Thursday, March 6th
