VISUAL ARTS: The photographs that make up Carmel Cleary's exhibition Passage, at the Garter Lane Arts Centre, are beautiful by any standard. They follow the winding curves of the deep, narrow Antelope Canyon in Arizona.
The canyon is a fissure carved into red sandstone by flash floods. Intense bursts of seasonal rainwater cut down through the complex layers of warm-coloured stone, following the line of least resistance and generating sinuous patterns of flow through narrow winding channels. Intense sunlight filters through from above, profiling every detail of way the water has moulded the walls. It all makes for one of the most extraordinary natural environments, strange, magical and, during the rainy season, dangerous, because huge quantities of water still race through the canyons with lethal force.
Cleary shows black-and-white and colour images. Her colour prints are pretty large, but her black-and-whites are enormous. A great deal of what is termed, in fine-art parlance, lens-based work is delivered by technicians. The artist may click the shutter, but from then on it's up to the lab to apply technical expertise, to tweak and tune until it comes out right. But Cleary is her own technician, to the extent that she had to customise a printing apparatus to cope with the scale of her black-and-white images.
In a subtle way, here, she is going against the tide in fine-art practice, in which technique has been downgraded and can even be regarded as in some way suspect. But she is going against the tide in another way as well, because the work is unequivocally beautiful and focuses on a natural subject to the exclusion of all else. Done with neither irony nor a knowing reference to a view of nature as a cultural construct, this can cause something like embarrassment in fine-art circles.
In a way the photographs are romantic landscapes, presenting us with views of a natural wonder that is both beautiful and awesome. Yet, as landscapes, they are unconventional. Rather than opening out into expanse and distance, the space in the images is enclosed and labyrinthine. Despite the show's title, glimpses of sky in some works do not really promise a way out.
In some of Cleary's earlier work she photgraphed stone in a way that suggested the sensuality and pliancy of flesh. And that association comes through here as well. The action of water on layered sandstone has produced walls of dazzling, flowing patterns enfolding twisted internal spaces. In some images the opposing canyon walls are like bodies engaged in an intricate dance. The similarity is there, and undoubtedly helps to draw us into the images, but it is never forced or contrived.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which the sheer beauty and otherness of the spectacle remains beyond us. Cleary has led us into a strange, hallowed space but has offered us no particular clues about it.
There are several more conventional landscape images that form a kind of prelude to the main body of the exhibition, and one of them features an extraordinary stone building tucked comfortably into the desert topography. But apart from this scene setting, with its hint of human habitation, the show is virtually abstract, in that its constituents are essentially the natural play of light and water on stone.
As John Hunt points out in his brief introductory note in the catalogue, Cleary is even careful not to provide us with a hint about scale, so that we literally do not know how we fit into these pictures. To adapt Walter Benjamin's remark about time, there is an infinite amount of beauty, but not for us.
Paddy Lennon's paintings in O Áit Go hÁit, at the Dyehouse Gallery, are landscapes. A painter who has been wary about colour in the past, he is now, and has been for a while, luxuriating in its possibilities. His work is always anchored firmly to the - often Spanish - landscape, in that we can see the patterns of fields, the lines of the shore and the horizon, we can orient ourselves in relation to the world depicted. At the same time, each painting is also a workspace, a demarcated area in which possibilities are rigorously explored and assessed.
Lennon is a painter who has not settled on a formula; he changes from show to show. Although he adheres to a relatively fixed mode of picture-making, he is, to his credit, more than willing to follow his instinct and take chances. He likes colours with a lush, luxuriant feeling: warm reds, deep blues and purples, pinks, oranges. And he is willing to build big compositions from blocks of predominantly dark colour, as his Winter Landscape makes clear. It is a subtle painting that gains from repeated viewings.
Many of the paintings suggest the idea that fields are inscribed on the land, literally. Hence they have harder surfaces and more defined forms than much of Lennon's previous landscape-related work, which was more amorphous. Yet some of the best pieces here resist being fenced in. The pale, tentative Strand Pool is a very good painting in that it seems to open the door to further developments and gives the viewer a lot of breathing space. Lennon is generally good on lighter colours but well able to handle intense reds and oranges, as the Sierra series demonstrates. He may let too many paintings onto the wall, but the best ones make up a sizeable and worthwhile bunch.
Reviewed
Carmel Cleary: Passage, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford, until March 29th, 051-877153
Paddy Lennon: O Áit Go hÁit, Dyehouse Gallery, Waterford, until March 28th, 051-844770
