Visual Arts: There's a touch of the enchanted forest to Elizabeth Magill's exhibition, Arborescence, at the Kerlin Gallery, echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream to her evocations of trees and woodlands silhouetted by misty radiance and sprinkled with dots and splashes of colour.
Those dots and splashes are exactly that. They don't really pretend to be anything else, yet they don't overbalance the poise of the images. Typically, Magill draws us into a scene and then reminds us that it's all done with mirrors.
She likes to take potentially kitsch elements - glitter, sentimental views of deer in forest glades, blazing sunsets - and then graft them on to the more sombre stock of German Romanticism, to produce her own perplexing hybrids,as though Caspar David Friedrich had embellished one of his symbolically charged mountain pines with helium balloons and gaily coloured ribbons. Caspar the party animal: it wouldn't quite work. But it doesn't seem inconsistent when applied to Magill. There is a vein of melancholy to what she does, a morning-after feeling of optimism, but also an equable cheerfulness.
She shows paintings and monoprints, and the latter find her in particularly relaxed form. They are all the better for it. She is willing to try things out, to go for densities of texture and atmosphere, to let things happen. In the larger paintings - which are also very good, it must be said - she is more studied and constrained but, relatively speaking, also more animated and adventurous than she was with the same kind of material a few years ago.
Some aspects of the paintings suggest the indirect influence of Peter Doig, not so much in terms of ideas as in a willingness to push them, to animate the surface and broaden things out. This is not a criticism, and it is in all a fine exhibition that sees Magill in impressively good form.
It is as if the paintings in Diana Copperwhite's show, In a Certain Light, at Kevin Kavanagh, have been momentarily caught in their particular configurations as, indeed, the title implies. A subtext running through this body of work is the shifting, uncertain nature of memory and, perhaps, of vision itself. Copperwhite is a fast, instinctive painter. Now, this does not mean that she completes her paintings quickly or that she doesn't think about them. But specific qualities of her work derive from her ability to juggle with incipient, complex internal relationships in the heat of the moment. That is, as with a gifted jazz instrumentalist, experience, skill and a state of heightened awareness help to generate a dynamic equilibrium in what she is doing. And it has to happen in the process.
From the beginning she has used a distinctive palette and tonal range. She juxtaposes and overlaps pinks, yellows, greens, pale blues and reds, together with pale greyish or ochre derivations of all those colours. Not that she shies completely away from darker hues and tones, but she predominantly likes colour pitched at a level of buoyancy, towards the brighter end of the scale. This gives her pictures a lightness, something that, in a way, makes things more difficult for her. We tend to associate dark tones with seriousness. Bright colour equals light content. But her paintings demonstrate that she is quite right; there is no a lack of gravitas to them.
Each painting involves negotiating the possibility of a space, much more than the achievement of an image. Images are usually there, a given, but not an end. Far more important for Copperwhite, one feels, is a resolution in openness. So that she will rapidly indicate, in a few decisive strokes or lines, the contours of a face or a figure, without fundamentally harnessing the painting to the image.
Seeing and remembering, and what we do with seeing and remembering, are definitely central concerns for her, but surely she is particularly taken with the sense of potential wrapped up in these processes: the area of contemplation and consideration, of turning things over in your mind, when they are ripe with possible meaning. So that while sometimes the issues - memory, loss - may seem freighted with melancholy, the pictures themselves are not melancholy. They are domains of excitement, open to transformation, and they are optically rich.
Each year the CAP Foundation awards a pair of one-year scholarships, including studio residencies, to two NCAD graduates, who then exhibit their work to coincide with the succeeding year's graduate show. There is, oddly enough, a strikingly retrospective cast to the work of both last year's recipients, Eoin McHugh and David Roche (whose show has just concluded).
McHugh was pretty much the star of last year's graduate show and it seems that people have been acquiring his work steadily ever since. One can see why. He is conventionally gifted, and he works representationally, with a contemporary twist. Characteristically, like a forger, he works on old paper, paper with a prior history, and uses ink and acrylic wash to make eclectic, enigmatic images. These images can be relatively straightforward, a wild landscape strangely located inside a geodesic dome, for example. But he also recurrently inclines towards people engaged in bizarre scientific experiments or caught in surreal predicaments.
Meanings are never pinned down. In fact, the pieces wouldn't work as well if they were. McHugh may not say it, but surely he relishes the ambiguity. Even contemporary or futuristic scenarios, when he employs them, are rendered in a retrospective way. So there is the idea of an older, authentic fragment taken out of context.
Roche is also predominantly a graphic artist. The centrepiece of his show, though, was a mechanical scroll, inspired by a plan proposed by Heron of Alexandria in the first century AD. The images are anecdotal, sometimes cartoon-like, and suggest how our madly optimistic schemes do not, predictably, work out in practice.
At AB Art Space in Galway, Russell Hart has curated a three-person, three-strand show. Si Schroeder's aural contribution is an agreeable piece of sound landscaping, which comes across like a piece of ambient electronica. Jo McGonigal reworks motifs from iconic minimalists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Her self-consciously casual drawings militate against the rigorously regimented, repeated geometric forms of Judd, although to do that much is, at this stage, merely to repeat a well-tried formula. Her Flavin, a horizontal strip of neon with an interruption, is much sharper.
Isabel Nolan pursues her discursive, casual aesthetic, from the pun of Dead Ends - a petrified piece of string which may remind you of a piece of string you once had yourself - to her At a Loss, which may be ravelling or unravelling, depending on your point of view.
126 Number 5 is probably the penultimate show in one of Ireland's most innovative venues. It features one drawing by Niamh McCann and pieces by Iain Hetherington. His work is particularly engaging: wittily maladroit disruptions of standard artistic craft, employing the tools and genres of the trade. It's as though he sets out with the best intentions, gets hopelessly lost along the way, but muddles through with inspired improvisational skills. He'd be right at home in the ambience of the AB Art Space show.
Reviewed
Arboresence, Elizabeth Magill, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until July 10 (01-6709093)
In a Certain Light, Diana Copperwhite, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until July 7 (01-8740064)
Eoin McHugh and David Roche, The Studio, 36 Leeson Close, ended
Si Schroeder, Isabel Nolan, Jo McGonigal, AB Arts Space, Galway, until July 15 (091-516630)
126 Number 5, Niamh McCann, Iain Hetherington, 126 Laurel Park, Galway, until June 30 (086-8035466/ 086-0804697)
