ReviewedOliver Comerford, Get Here, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until April 27th (01-8740064). Michael Mulcahy, Paintings, Taylor Gallery until April 20th (01- 6766055)
Oliver Comerford's last Dublin exhibition, Talk to Me, in 1998, chronicled a trip to Iceland in a pictorial idiom derived partly from road movies, partly from photography and partly from the melancholy romanticism of painters as diverse as Ed Ruscha, Edward Hopper and Casper David Friedrich.
Iceland, with its big empty expanses, its coldness, its subdued, moody light and deep darkness suited Comerford's liking for images of quiet desolation and his penchant for being at the edge of things. It is worth noting that he also referred obliquely in the work to the paraphernalia of communication.
Now, with Get Here, his new show of new paintings at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, communication and the lack of it are evidently still on his mind, and still treated obliquely. Technically more accomplished than ever, he explores a twilight or night-time world of anonymous roads, conifer woodlands, mirror-still lakes, views back over the town spread out on the plain below, a graveyard. The roads are usually empty save for the distant tail-light dots of a disappearing car. The spaces are anomalous, nowhere spaces, away from town, with just the makeshift habitation of a caravan or a camper van, but more usually empty.
You get the feeling that all the work is not geographically specific to one place. Sometimes it looks as if it might be Ireland, sometimes the United States - particularly with iconic images like that of a pick-up truck.
In all likelihood the intention is to unobtrusively generate a sense of an everywhere-nowhere, a kind of psychic terrain familiar from life, film and painting.
In any case it all amounts to a wintry, melancholy world.
The cumulative sense of solitude, the suggestion of departures and separations, of distance and an abiding apartness seem to imply a concern with the difficulties of communication, but also with the quintessential road movie impulse to move, a need to get away, to escape and to keep moving. So that a certain sadness in the images is leavened with a distinctly pleasurable melancholy.
Like Velasquez, Comerford only uses as much paint as he has to. Just enough to do the job, nothing more. Often he'll scrape pigment away rather than add some to create a detail or an accent. Hence the surfaces of his paintings have a flat, minimal, pared-down quality. Not only is this bravely understated and completely un-showy, it also suits the pared- down quality of his imagery. In the substance and form of that imagery he continues to draw very much on the language of film and photography.
That is to say, he uses their conventions in terms of the generic identity of his images, and in terms of optical effects - all those pools and ribbons of light, for example.
In fact he clearly relishes the way light soaks into photographic emulsion. There's also the blur of movement, as originally devised by Gerhard Richter. Comerford's use of a uniform size and landscape format throughout reinforces the photographic association, and it is not incidental that his work looks particularly good en masse. Which is not to say that the paintings are not individually strong. They are.
A sickle moon, a flower. Michael Mulcahy's new paintings at the Taylor Gallery take one thing at a time or, the same but different, they take on big, empty spaces. Head-on views of the sea at night fill the frame. Either way, there is no attempt to romanticise or anecdotalise the subject, it's just there. Although he has made a great deal of work that deals assertively with a big, bold, symbol-laden langauge of abstract and representational forms, he has also been consistently aware that, on occasion, less is more, even though Mulcahy the subdued lyricist may be less recognisable than Mulcahy the swashbuckling expressionist.
That he has been so often typecast as a swaggering 1980's Neo-Expressionist is not exactly unfair, given his evident enjoyment of the role. In 1982 he painted himself as St Brendan the Navigator, facing indomitably into the dark expanse of the Atlantic off the Southwest coast. But it was not braggadocio. Mulcahy the artist was prepared to jump off the edge of the world. He is haunted by the notion of the void, the possibility that there is nothing there, and wants to hear an answer back from the darkness.
He went to paint the boundless spaces of the Sahara and the heavens above it, and to paint the boundless interior spaces of the meditating mind in Korea. Both these experiences inform his accounts of the night-time sea with its air of infinite calm. Inner and outer space alike have become, in his paintings, energised spaces, alive with potential. So that his evocations of quietness, of nothingness are always curiously concentrated, packed. The surface of the sea is an appropriate metaphor for the surface of the painting: a subdued but also lively, phosphorescent expanse with intimations of richness beneath. Whereas before the subject was the archetypal figure of Brendan, a spiritual and physical adventurer, heroically dominating the elements, now Brendan is attuned to the elements and implicit within them.
In the recent past, Mulcahy's painted figures, stylised and angular, have had an awkwardness about them, fitting uneasily within the frame. This wasn't necessarily unintentional. All those issues of figuration seem to be bound up in the images of flowers in the recent work. Flamboyantly sexual and sensual, they can be read as indicative of integrated, organic wholeness. In all, this body of work is calmer, less varied than one might expect of him, but all the more assured and impressive for that.
