Reviewed:
Land and Language, Robert Ballagh, The Pearse Family Home, 27 Pearse Street, until May 12
New work, Barrie Cooke, Kerlin Gallery until May 21 (01-6709093)
Stem, Alison Pilkington, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until May 19 (01-8740064)
It is, as he notes himself, a long time since Robert Ballagh's last solo gallery show in Dublin - 1983, in fact. Not that he hasn't been busy, most famously with Riverdance, but also with other design work (including banknotes) and painting. Now, Land and Language, at the Pearse family home on Pearse Street, marks his slightly unorthodox (in terms of venue and style) return to exhibiting.
The show consists of a series of painting-text works that collectively form a meditation on landscape and our relationship to it. They are painting-texts in the way that Willie Doherty's earlier works were photo-texts. Ballagh uses individual words and, more commonly, proverbs, ingeniously incorporating them in a series of emblematic landscape images. The words and proverbs are all in Irish. The project grew out of his Riverdance experience of painting landscapes for back-projection, introducing him to a faster, more fluent means of painting than his usual, exceptionally painstaking method.
Landscape is a genre that Ballagh consciously avoided in the early stage of his career, eschewing its association with aesthetic and political conservatism. At the time, he thought his job as a painter was to make work that was "urban and poppy". As the years went by, his views on this became less doctrinaire, but the self-imposed prohibition on landscape seems to have persisted, because it occurred to him not long ago that, in 30 years of painting, he had never painted landscape per se.
The landscapes he has now painted are, with one or two exceptions, invented. They draw on popular conceptions of Irish scenery and, left as images pure and simple, they would be very well made but relatively bland images. However, part of his rationale was to explore the way landscape acquires meaning through language, hence the proverbs which, he observes, though rooted in the land, ultimately refer to the people who live on the land.
He has a lot of fun incorporating the language in the stuff of the landscape, carved in stone or cast in bronze (and silver-plated). Perhaps part of the point of using Irish is to underline the fact that the connection between people and land can be broken. The anglicisation of Irish place names and the diminution of local knowledge brought about by the Famine and other waves of depopulation of rural Ireland amount to a significant cultural loss that can never be made good.
Yet the show is far from being a lament for something lost. It is celebratory and even playful, made with an evident delight in invention and craft, and marks an unexpected but welcome return.
The innovation in Barrie Cooke's Kerlin Gallery show is a series of paintings of Knocknarea, the landmark hill south-west of Sligo town. The other main strand in the exhibition is made up of another series of what might be termed fishing pictures, Black Stones and Striper - a title that accurately sums up the format and the content. Across the top of each canvas is a row of almost formally aligned boulders, while a striper lurks down in the watery expanse beneath. These works are quite austere in their varied deployment of just a few elements. Set against the intractable mass and geometry of the stones, the fish is a vulnerable, elusive and somehow heroic presence: the energy of life gamely taking on the inertia of death.
Cooke has been based close to Lough Arrow for a number of years now. It is well known that he is a keen fisherman, and the lake has featured and continues to feature in his work - unhappily in a negative light, in pictures about the proliferation of algae in the water. In a wider context, the surrounding Sligo landscape is steeped in myth and history.
Like most artists, Cooke has been wary about painting features that have an iconic status. It is unusual for an artist to take on, as Cooke does here, a landmark like Knocknarea. The many cairns that dot it are dominated by the huge Miosgan Meabha, fabled to contain the body of Queen Maeve of Connacht, standing upright in full armour and facing Ulster. In fact she is thought to be interred elsewhere, but the tangle of myth and history gives some indication of what is entailed in the depiction of the hill. Cooke views it not as most visitors encounter it, from the approach to Sligo town, but from the Strandhill side.
Recalling his account of the Burren, his pictures seem to probe the dome-like structure with its stacked layers of limestone. There is a terrific brightness, verve and lightness of touch to these works.
The paintings that make up Stem, Alison Pilkington's ambiguously titled exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, are composed of bold swathes of strong colour. It seems to be part of the artist's intention that we are never quite sure of the kind or scale of the spaces she evokes. There are certainly spaces in the work, spaces defined and swept by waves and flurries of energy. The crisp bravura of her delivery, together with other points of similarity, bring to mind the German painter Gerhard Richter. But, though they are coherent and attractive, and more than satisfactory in many respects, Pilkington's images are not quite as sharp, as there, as they need to be, because so much depends on their communicated immediacy, their casual-seeming precision. While they are good, you could say they don't quite clinch the argument.
