Visual Arts:Reviewed: Wilhelm Sasnal, paintings, Douglas Hyde Gallery until Jan 27 (01-8961116) Still Changing, Michael Smyth, Gormley's Fine Art, Dublin until Jan 22 (01-6729031) Old, Rare, and Unusual Roses, Pavel Büchler, The Return, Goethe-Institut until Jan 17 (01-6611155)
Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal is, according to the publicity material, top of the journal Flash Art's list of the leading 100 artists in the world, as nominated by both critics and gallerists. You may be surprised by that, not only because Sasnal is a painter in a relatively traditional sense rather than an exponent of new media or photography, but also because his work is almost painfully oblique and tentative. It looks simple, the press release informs us, but is in fact "the result of much thought about the complexity of modern life and the elusiveness of meaning" - a statement largely borne out by the work.
The paintings are simple to the extent that they are very spare. Sasnal's palette veers toward the monochromatic, with muted, dispirited-looking blues, greens, earths and lots of grey. His representational strategy follows on from Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans and others in drawing on second-hand sources of various kinds, including photographs and elements of the designed environment. It's not just the images that matter in this, but the modes of representation they encapsulate. Sasnal deals with a mediated world and the implication is that we live in a mediated world, a world of pre-existing representations to which the characteristic artistic attitude is one of baleful scepticism.
Hence his caution, and indeed something approaching a sulky determination not to be impressed by anything visual and not to make anything visually seductive himself. Instead he breaks things down into diminished, ambiguous fragments. "Geopolitics and oil" are identified as the subject matter. Sure enough, there is an architectonic study of a petrol station and, elsewhere, silhouettes that hint at cultural and racial stereotypes. But Sasnal is strategically wary and non-committal. He could easily deny all knowledge if it was suggested that any one image was "about" anything in particular, and this is both a strength and a weakness.
Like much contemporary art, his can congratulate itself on its cultural knowingness. You can't pull the wool over my eyes, it seems to say, in the face of the onslaught of the contemporary, globalised world, in which meaning is furiously contested. But its mode of resistance is a puritanical purging of the visual, a defensive wariness. There is something evasive about this, and an underlying complacency, as though to allude, however vaguely, to something is in some sense to deal with it on a critical level, when in fact it is not. Sasnal's is interesting work, but it prompts the question as to whether contemporary art is really so constrained, backed too tightly into its own corner.
Imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, Basil Blackshaw should be immensely flattered by Michael Smyth's exhibition at Gormley's Fine Art which is, in essence, a perplexing exercise in stylistic mimicry. But Smyth doesn't have pastiche in mind. The catalogue for the show, and at least one of Smyth's previous catalogues feature an endorsement from Blackshaw himself, or at least approving remarks about Smyth's development as a painter. In truth, though, that development is sporadic and odd. Odd in terms of the sheer degree to which Smyth apes Blackshaw's painterly language, as though he aspires to be Basil Blackshaw in a way that recalls the surreal comedy of Being John Malkovich. So much so that the show could be titled Being Basil Blackshaw.
His development is distinctly sporadic, though, because much of the work in his current show looks cursory and half-formed. He evokes the appearance but can't match the lifetime's experience or, the evidence forcefully suggests, the intrinsic ability. He is also inclined to work a motif to death without usefully developing it. His figure paintings are especially weak and the appropriation of some of Blackshaw's mannerisms merely serves to underline the disparity between the two artists in terms of quality. To take one relevant point: Blackshaw's painting is informed by a powerful sense of nothingness, a void, whereas the vacuity in Smyth's work arises from the feeling that he is idly filling in the background.
So what is going on here? One suspects that it has a lot to do with the current state of the Irish art market, which is both conservative and over-heated. It is not uncommon for a learning or inexperienced artist to become possessed with the artistic spirit of an admired exemplar, while simultaneously being blind to the sheer level of influence at work. It's a phase of a long apprenticeship; it passes. But at a time when Blackshaw is one of the most sought-after artists, and his work is scarce, the appeal for aspiring collectors of work that at least looks like Blackshaw's, even though it's not the real thing, is presumably overwhelming. It would be simply wrong to view Smyth as being in any sense the "new" Blackshaw, however, because so far he hasn't remotely begun to move outside the shadow of his greatest influence.
At The Return, Dublin's smallest gallery, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes has curated a quietly engrossing show by Pavel Büchler. Old, Rare and Unusual Rosescould be described as a meditation on some of the many levels of meaning attendant on the word rose. These include a partly tabulated source code for a digital picture of a rose - a fragment of a huge sequence of code which considerably ups the estimate in the "picture is worth a thousand words" equation.
A quotation from Goethe's theory of colour - painted in watercolour - raises the question of the relationship between language and colour. It's a subject also broached in a verse from the book that gives the show its title. One of the nicest ideas is the blossoming paint tube, opened out and split so that the pigment flowers. There's a lot going on here, but it doesn't feel crowded. Büchler has a tactful, sensitive approach and wears his learning lightly.
