Visual Arts: ReviewedPatrick Hall: 50 Years Painting, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, until Sept 10 071-9141405, subsequently at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Jan 12-Feb 23, 2007
Patrick Hall: 50 Years Painting at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery is a substantial show, though not an orthodox or comprehensive retrospective. Rather, as the Model's director, Sarah Glennie, is at pains to point out in her introduction to the catalogue, it is one artist's personal selection of another's work. As it happened, Hall was not interested in a conventional retrospective, and he was keen that Isabel Nolan be involved in the project. She, for her part, was on record as admiring him. Glennie detects a commonality not of style or content but of motivation and meaning. "Both are driven by a desire to in some way mark their experience of living and find their position in the world."
Hall is certainly a vocational artist through and through. He pursues a calling rather than a career. His art is indistinguishable from his life. It is tempting to say that his involvement with making art is akin to an extreme form of religious expression, except that, in place of blind faith, there is always an element of doubt and uncertainty at the very heart of what he does.
At the same time, several aspects of his approach to art recall elements of religious life: austerity and devotion, periods spent in contemplative seclusion, a quality of mortification, not to mention an inclination towards imagery of a visionary, Biblical nature. What is suggested here is a spiritual yearning, a yearning that is in no way contradicted, incidentally, by the explicit references to sexual pleasure and desire in several of the drawings and paintings.
Hall was born close to Roscrea in 1935, one of seven children in a mixed, Protestant-Catholic family. His father, an embittered and somewhat embattled man, opened the first cinema in Roscrea, though was unlucky in this and other business ventures.
In an interview with Molly O'Sullivan of the Green on Red Gallery, Hall recalled noticing things disappearing from the house in his early teens, as his mother quietly sold them in a bid to make ends meet. These unremarked losses may, he feels, have contributed to his becoming an artist: the attempt to hold onto things, to elucidate them and value them in themselves, is a recurrent preoccupation in his paintings of simple still life subjects, of objects of desire, and of sheer intensities of feeling, both good and bad.
He studied art in London, then moved on to Spain, where he lived in frugal isolation for a number of years. There are paintings and drawings from this Spanish phase in the show, and they are relatively colourful and lyrical. Back in Ireland, he maintained a reclusive existence for a while in Wicklow before moving into Dublin city around 1974. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of stylised, phallic male figures in interiors broached areas of emotional and sexual experience in an outspoken way.
Michele Cone wrote in 1995 that he had been "way ahead of his time in dealing with his sexuality. Men's bodies, stories around sexual encounters and their aftermath, are recurring themes in his work."
Two exhibitions towards the end of the 1980s dealt with the loss of someone close to him, and perhaps the desolation of that loss and, in a wider context, the Aids epidemic and other disasters on an almost unimaginable, global scale, extends to much of what Hall has done since. Many of the paintings of the early 1990s, dauntingly barren expanses heaped with piles of human skulls, suggest a bleakness of vision. And yet, even in these stark images there is also an intimation of transcendence and transfiguration. He has described his involvement with paint as saving him from abstraction. Its materiality as a medium dragged him back into the concrete realm.
Even when conveying, perhaps celebrating, intensities of emotion and sensuality, there is a quality of sombre deliberation to his painting, as though he is always at one remove, observing rather than being. The analytical concept of working through is central to his approach to painting. This is not to say that what he does is purely a form of art therapy though, as it happens, there is clearly a therapeutic dimension to it. He is, you could say, painting for his life, painting as though his life depended on it and, who knows, perhaps it does.
Yet what he does is not therapeutic in the received sense of being indulgently expressive. Rather there is a stringency to it, a determination to get beyond such things. Perhaps this stems partly from the historical moment when he seemed to first find his voice, the moment of Neo-expressionism at the end of the 1970s.
The same determination to push paint beyond the habitual consolations of expressiveness is evident in the work of Patrick Graham. Graham, a draughtsman and painter conventionally gifted to a much greater degree than either Hall or Brian Maguire, to name two close contemporaries, has consistently produced work that rejected facility. In particular, oil painting's seductive fluency and virtuosity, which could be regarded as central to its attraction as a medium, were distrusted and dispensed with.
Alternative strategies, such as a recourse to words rather than images, the use of fragmentation, quotation, or of simplified, exhausted imagery emerging from a muddy no-man's-land of blasted territory, are evident in the work of all three artists at various times. Yet for Hall a characteristic pictorial awkwardness stems not from a rejection of facility but a straightforward bid to attain a true image. He battles his technical limitations but, as with many artists throughout history, has made them work for him rather than against him.
In simplified terms, you could say that he veers between unaffected directness, describing what is there in front of him, and schematic, Blakean visions on a cosmic scale. Both are effected with pared-down simplicity; it could be argued that they are two aspects of the same consciousness: looking outwards and looking inwards.
What stands as one of his best series of paintings was inspired by Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas. In Hall's orgiastic paintings Titian's voluptuous treatment of this cruel mythological subject symbolises the intense, gruelling nature of lived experience. Pleasure and pain, possession and loss, inner and outer worlds are all simultaneously evoked in seething cauldrons of pigment.
