Visual arts reviews include Accidents of Desire at the Mermaid Arts Centre, AINT at Draíocht, and Paintings from Old Europe at Ashford Gallery.
Accidents of Desire, Philippa Sutherland, Mermaid Arts Centre until Feb 18 (01-2724302) AINT, Susan Connolly, Draíocht First Floor Gallery until Mar 4 (01-8098026) Paintings from Old Europe, Dougal McKenzie, Ashford Gallery until tomorrow (01-6617286)
In Accidents of Desire at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Philippa Sutherland makes paintings of people and spaces. The figures in her pictures are usually alone, listless, dreaming, thinking. Occasionally there are couples, and the feeling is imparted that, while the couples are preoccupied by their feelings for each other, the individual figures, too, are brooding on relationships.
The people she depicts are youngish, well dressed and occupy salubrious surroundings. They brings to mind European art cinema, including Michelangelo Antonioni's way of depicting glamorous figures emotionally adrift in empty places in films that were enormously influential in terms of style across a range of endeavours, including fashion photography.
Antonioni excels at using landscape metaphorically, often as indicative of the emotional states of his protagonists, and Sutherland, too, has a very particular slant on landscape. She likes empty spaces, sometimes wintry, and she describes people and places alike in a spare pictorial language that is both simplified and fragmentary. Colour is washed out, tending toward greyish tones. Her compositions are like shots from a film. Close-up: a bare arm extends across a pale blanket. Cut to: water laps against the shore of a lake. So that although each picture is separate, taken together they seem to make up narrative sequences in the way that Katy Simpson's composite paintings do. That is, they suggest various lines of interpretation without committing themselves to a specific story.
Since completing her MA in 2004, she has been busy (she is also showing work at the Paul Kane Gallery at the moment, for example, as one strand of a three-person show). Perhaps too busy.
To be fair, her low-key work has a hard time in the setting. The Mermaid is a large venue, not to mention a very difficult one. Like many arts centre galleries, the gallery is a strange architectural compromise, neither one thing nor the other (to a lesser extent the same applies to Draíocht), half theatre foyer, half nothing. It's not a neutral space and work sited there has to contend with a plethora of visual distractions and interruptions, from the carpet to the numerous doorways, windows, corners and miscellaneous details. There is a glaring need for a short, pithy reference book called something like Gallery Design for Architects.
In any case, Sutherland's work, which depends on being precisely calculated and impeccably made, shows signs of strain here. Several pieces are poorly finished or cursory in execution. The show would be better and more effective shorn of about one third of what is on view, a sign perhaps that she needs to take stock and regroup. This is not to take from what is very good about it, though. There are some lovely sequences of images that work very well. While she is comfortable with oil paint, interior world, a hotel room interior rendered in ink wash, is very promising. It could be argued that the people she focuses on are privileged and self-absorbed and hence of marginal concern but, as with Antonioni, her honesty and aesthetic rigour mean that no special pleading is necessary.
Susan Connolly's AINT occupies the first floor gallery - that is the foyer - at Draíocht in Blanchardstown. The title is a strong clue to what the work is about: just add P.
Connolly makes her works with a combination of addition and substraction, laying on thick coats of acrylic and then cutting through and peeling back layers to reveal underlying colours and marks. She uses geometric repeat patterns, sometimes in strict grids, sometimes more flexibly and spontaneously, always with a light touch.
Her palette tends toward bright, synthetic colours, as if to emphasise an underlying preoccupation with fabric and fabric design and manufacture. The reverse of many of the peeled back sections of paint bear the imprint of the canvas support, so much so that the paint itself resembles fabric.
But the layer on layer of bold colour and patterning also brings to mind printed fabrics, just as the painstaking, time-consuming methodology relates to woven structure.
In the more complex pieces, particularly, there is the feeling that the substance of painting is being physically deconstructed before our eyes, as though the myriad overlapping layers of pigment that constitute a finished work are magically exploded into three dimensions which, in fact, is pretty much the case. There is also the odd effect of suggesting a number of potential, distinct paintings in a single piece, as we backtrack through each layer of decision-making. They are, in all, conceptually intriguing, visually engaging and good-humoured works.
There is a tapestry-like quality to Dougal McKenzie's Paintings from Old Europe at the Ashford Gallery. He is, for some reason, particularly interested in the battle of Culloden in 1746, when the Jacobites and Hanoverians clashed.
Not that he is obsessively concerned with this one, historically significant event. Rather, to judge by his paintings, his interest seems to extend to the way what we might categorise as historical in the sense of past persists and resonates in the present. Recent European conflicts echo old enmities, things do not really change, old scores remain to be settled.
There is another point implied as well. In the paintings, tokens of these messy historical happenings literally materialise through the modernist Utopian schemes.
It is as if McKenzie's paintings aspire to be abstracts but are troubled by figurative nightmares. He has a slow, patient way of painting - hence the tapestry-textured surface - that recalls David Crone, a kind of teasing out of possibilities and nuances that requires and rewards equally patient looking.
