Visual Arts: Reviewed: The Devil's Interval, John Cronin. Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard St East Until May 19 01-6713414
Some Time Now, Brian Fay, and Pleasures and Days, Mark Beatty, Frederica Bastide Duarte, Ian Charlesworth, Paul Flannery, Roisin Lewis, John O'Connell and The Fold. The LAB, Foley St Mon-Sat 10am-5pm Until June 9 01-2225445
Follow the Light, Charles Matson Lume, Rhona Byrne, Aoife Desmond and Frances Jung, in a show curated by Beth O'Halloran. Stone Gallery, 70 Pearse St Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Thurs 10am-7pm, Sat 11am-5.30pm Until May 5 01-6711020
The title of John Cronin's show at Green on Red, The Devil's Interval, is taken from "the discordant tri-tone notes in music composition which, in the Middle Ages, were banned by the church". Apart from presenting difficulties for singers, the jarring sounds of the tones were taken to signify evil. Hence the saying: "Mi against fa is the devil in music." Cronin is not illustrating the musical construction, though his painting does suggest music in several ways. One is his use of stave-like horizontal groupings of parallel lines, applied in rhythmic patterns, built up and scraped away in layers.
The bold interplay of pure colour also has a musical feeling to it. In fact, "bold" is probably understating it. Cronin habitually likes jarring colour clashes in his compositions, in which acidic shades of red, blue, green and yellow battle it out for our attention. The optical dissonance is further heightened by the way the paint is dragged sideways across the surface, so that the forms are blurred and out of focus, and our eyes can never quite rest. It could be that Cronin views his usually noisy arrangements of colour and line as painterly counterparts of the discordant sequences of notes. The other kind of note, the one accompanying the exhibition, suggests the title might refer to the self-imposed constraints and prohibitions that are part of the working process.
Cronin is a very capable painter, and the work is very well put together. What one feels about the harshness of the colour, the lack of subtlety and the insistence of the linear patterning largely comes down to a matter of taste, because the stridency is intended and reasonable. However, the paintings do look as if they are inspired by or derived from a specific phase of work by the German painter Gerhard Richter. Boldly colourful bands of horizontally blurred pigment, given added slickness by the use of a sheet aluminium support are characteristic Richter tropes. This is a problem, because Cronin's paintings suffer in any comparison. It is as if he has taken a very specific painterly vocabulary but hasn't quite managed to push or develop it enough.
THE LINKED DOUBLE-BILLat the LAB on Foley Street, Brian Fay's Some Time Nowand the group drawing show Pleasures and Days, easily merits a visit. Fay's distinctive way of working involves tracing the craquelure, the distinctive patterns of fine surface cracks that are to be widely found in the paintings that line the walls of museums.
Fay's painstaking record of what, in the normal course of events, we don't really notice is a way of visualising the action of time on things popularly presumed to be preserved in a state of something approaching permanence: won't the Mona Lisaalways be there?
It could be that Fay is pointing to the transience of things generally, seeing the moment of a paintings completion as just one point on a time-line of making and unmaking, the energy of organisation succumbing to entropic decay. Yet we must effectively take what we see in his show on faith. Can we be sure he has faithfully traced the craquelure on any particular work, and would it make any difference if he hadn't? What one can say is that some of his drawings work better than others, and the smaller-scale ones are notably more effective than the larger ones. It's not clear as to why this should be, but the intricate networks of spider's web-like lines are somehow more pleasing and, oddly, more convincing on a smaller scale.
Fay co-curated Pleasures and Days, which continues the preoccupation with time and duration. The title is from a collection of writings by Proust, whose interest in time and memory was, of course, second to none. The term drawing is stretched to encompass such works as John O'Connell's intriguing film and video works, which are very striking. O'Connell creates small worlds, miniature landscapes that ambiguously and ingeniously evoke vast spaces. He shows three short pieces, though an atmosphere of desolation and melancholy runs consistently through them all, in part engendered by a moody soundtrack.
The exhibition also encompasses The Fold, a publication edited by artists Cora Cummins and Alison Pilkington. The first issue is currently available in the gallery, and it's pretty good, nicely designed, with contributions from eight artists on the theme of Torch Songs. The remaining work in the show conforms to a fairly conventional definition of drawing. Pieces by Ian Charlesworth, Paul Flannery, Frederica Bastide Durante and Mark Beatty are all immediately accessible and interesting, and Roisin Lewis's Perennial Drawingis something more, a fine piece of work charting the blooming and fading of perennial flowers in superimposed layers.
At the Stone Gallery, Follow the Lightmarshals works by four artists for whom the role of light is central. This is obviously so in Aoife Desmond's plant-based sculpture and drawings. In fact her Wardian case with Lemon Geraniumis mostly a living plant and hence entirely light-dependent, though this vigorous sample is not the kind of delicate specimen that would originally have been installed in the eponymous miniature glass house. Desmond's line drawings are sensitive and have a suitably tentative, exploratory quality .
Frances Jung's paintings are subdued accounts of sumptuous objects and settings with an almost hallucinatory air. The myriad glittering facets of her Chandelierare picked up in Charles Matson Lume's the first sky is inside you II, in which masses of tiny circular mirrors scattered on the ground become a composite sky by virtue of reflected light. Elsewhere, the appropriately named Lume's smaller pieces employ various found objects to cast shadows with a message. They are delicate, nicely observed works. Rhona Byrne's photographic prints are glimpses of fleeting luminescent effects.
It is in all a nice, thoughtfully installed show.
