Reviewed: Ballyconnoe South: Tom Molloy, Rubicon Gallery until January 27th (01-6708055); Poignant Distance: Christopher Banahan, Hallward Gallery until January 24th (01-6621482); Colin Martin, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until January 27th (018740064); Small: Paul Kane Gallery until February 3rd (01-6703141)
Tom Molloy's work usually has a strong conceptual basis, and that in Ballyconnoe South, his latest show at the Rubicon, is no exception. When you enter the gallery, you see an orderly row of black-and-white paintings. With just some minor shifts of angle, they are versions of the same, fairly nondescript scene: a landscape dominated by a conifer plantation.
It's as if Molloy proceeds via a series of negatives. Instead of offering us one definitive composition, he presents a series of repetitious alternatives, with just slight variations. While the setting is in County Clare, he avoids the prototypical West of Ireland landscape, opting instead for an imported, utilitarian plant, the sitka spruce. Though he uses oil paint and foregrounds the expressive, signature brushstrokes, he works in a photographic mode, eschewing colour in favour of black and white. But, though you wouldn't know to look at them, under each image is a full colour rendition of the scene. Neither is it apparent that, to underscore the photographic connection, he paints on aluminium, a material associated with photographic reproduction. This methodology, an accompanying note suggests, has to do with questioning "issues surrounding the nature of the authentic within contemporary oil painting practice". The labour-intensive commitment to arbitrary conceptual schemes recalls the game-centred strategies of the writer Georges Perec in terms of the form of his fictions (he wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e", for example), and in terms of the projects undertaken by the characters he created in, notably, Life: A User's Manual.
Like Perec's writing, Molloy's work (his is a suitably Beckettian name given his preoccupations) suggests a certain frustration, a dissatisfaction with facility. His elaborately self-defeating projects serve to bring us back to zero, which can be, in turn, frustrating for the viewer. Perec's dazzling linguistic and formal inventiveness carry us along, but Molloy is altogether more severe and didactic in his approach. There may be a covert thrill in realising that beneath the monochrome is a full-colour painting forever lost to view, but you may also find yourself wondering whether it was any good, and once questions like that intrude, you are edging away from the conceptual rigour of the project. Is that project successfully achieved? Within its own terms, undoubtedly, but then those terms are perhaps too self-limiting and unadventurous.
In their exhibitions of paintings, both Christopher Banahan and Colin Martin acknowledge some of the issues that Molloy sets out to address directly. Banahan reworks images from the past and gives current images a self-consciously retrospective aura. He picks on paintings by Vermeer, Chardin and Velazquez and, oddly, further distances them from us by treating them as if they are fragmented traces of early or pre-Renaissance frescoes.
In titling his exhibition Poignant Distance, Banahan wears his heart on his sleeve. In effect, he is building nostalgia into the artefact in much the way that distressed surfaces are employed by decorators to evoke the decayed Venetian palazzo look. Though, to be fair, Banahan's intent goes beyond the decorative. He is clearly trying to convey a sense of human transience, of the fragility of life and memory. In doing so, though, he plays around within an unduly restricted range in terms of content and, especially, form.
Often the works come across as pastiche archaeological exhibits. In a few pieces here, he filters portrait images through fabric in an understated way that carries on directly from his previous work. The more ambitious he becomes, the more the same idea is stretched, and one feels he could have been more enterprising.
Colin Martin established his formidable reputation as a printmaker with works that evoked the close, highly charged atmosphere of family life. This, his first show of paintings, acknowledges his print origins by using copper plates as paint supports, but it also opens out the mise en scene considerably, while still suggesting a commitment to implied narrative. In fact, given the enigmatic, fragmentary images, individually and collectively freighted with narrative hints, someone like Katy Simpson comes to mind as a comparison.
Technically, the paintings are a little uncertain, even awkward, and explicitly photographic in the sense of evoking the optics of photographs rather than imitating the smoothness of photographic illusion. In fact, there is a feeling that Martin is on a learning curve in this show, but that isn't to detract from his achievement at all, because what comes across is an honest, exploratory attitude, a concentrated process of looking at things and learning how to describe them with paint.
He focuses on the ordinary, a world tied to domesticity, with the implication of inner life in the people he depicts. If he isn't quite there yet as a painter, you do leave the show with a sense of anticipation about what he might do with everything he has learned in making this show.
Small is an agreeable group show in which the outstanding pieces are by Edward Kennedy, his two beautiful but rigorous paintings dominated by luscious, creamy whites. Aidan Bradley wrestles with abstracts that evoke landscape and breaks free in one freer, fiery work. Mark Pepper has portraits of workaday tools of the trade.
Landscape in various forms dominates the work of Roisin McGuigan (formalised and orderly), Maura Austen (constrained and tentative), Cathy Addis (going for intense colour), Niall Naessens (technically polished) and Margaret O'Sullivan (good, vigorous studies of wild herbs).
