Reviewed:
Compositions 6: Mary Rose Binchy, Green on Red Gallery until April 7th (01-6713414);
Scaileanna Greine: Joe Dunne, Ashford Gallery, Ely Place until March 29th (016617286);
New Paintings: Michael Kane, Rubicon Gallery until March 31st
As the title might suggest, Mary Rose Binchy's paintings in Compositions 6 are fashioned according to some given constraints. The six refers to the number that make up her family unit (she, her husband, four children), and a musical reference has also been suggested (Bach's six Brandenberg Concertos?). In a way, the musical element comes to the fore in the work, which takes the form of a series of related abstract paintings composed of interlocking, soft-edged blocks of colour, ranging from pale, soft blue and grey to very dark, intense bursts of alizarin crimson and deep grey.
Binchy generates some interesting effects through her management of tone, colour and expanse. Significantly, she is able to handle large-scale paintings. It's relatively easy to animate a small expanse of flat colour, and very difficult to do the same writ large. What shortcomings there are in her work run consistently through small and large scales. These can be summed up as a tendency towards looseness, a certain slackness. Sometimes a particular composition just seems to give her the slip, as if she loses her connection with it and the energy ebbs away. And similarly with colour (although she certainly has a good colour sense), with some striking combinations, occasionally a pale grey, for example, just dying away within a composition - as it scarcely ever does in, say, a Rothko.
Nor does it, in fact, in the many works that make up Joe Dunne's packed, perhaps over-packed, but consistently rewarding show at the Ashford Gallery, Scaileanna Greine. Dunne has been from the first a meticulous and technically accomplished painter and draughtsman. But there has always been a hint of something more, the feeling that he actually had something to say, rather then being an efficient academic technician pure and simple. This intimation has, admittedly, been muted, and Dunne has consistently described a suburban world that could easily, if unkindly, be described as bland. It is probably true to say that the fact that he is a conservative artist in terms of his style and concerns has also militated against his being taken seriously.
His recent work sees him for the first time explicitly explore, rather than passively describe, the suburban world, an exploration that leads him into abstraction, albeit abstraction firmly rooted in the spaces, planes, light and atmosphere of his surroundings. He remarks in a catalogue note that he feels the pictures are successful if they "touch on . . . some sense of mystery", which is exactly right, and earmarks the quality that probably counts most in the end.
Strangely enough, his foray into abstraction seems to have consolidated his prowess as a realist painter, and a work like Blue Dress is a beautifully poised, classical, full-figure portrait, understated but quietly strong, a very good painting on anyone's terms. Elsewhere, he is much preoccupied with taking various permutations of form and incorporating them in nicely poised compositions of surface pattern, always bringing things up towards the picture plane. He does this with still life arrangements a la Charles Brady, rural landscapes, and what might be called suburban landscapes. The most impressive aspect of all this is that every square centimetre of each painting has been considered, mulled over and addressed until it works. It must stand as a landmark show for him.
Michael Kane's handsomely installed, sombre suite of paintings at the Rubicon is a tribute to the late James McKenna. That wasn't the initial intention, though. Kane recounts how, after a break from his working routine, he began making studies from his own drawing of a McKenna sculpture from the late 1950s, a head of a young man. These studies mutated over time into something approaching a series of self-portraits. But before the sequence was complete, McKenna died, so they stand as a personal memorial.
The huge, craggy heads are made in Kane's rough-hewn, broadly brushed expressionist style. They are mostly dark. While there is colour in the paintings - eruptions of yellow, or earthy reds and pinks - for the most part they look as if the colour has been worked out of them, lending the heads a dark-lit, heavily shadowed presence, formidable and a little overwhelming en masse. Together with the few works that allow a variation in format, they suggest a sulphurous mixture of German Expressionism and Frank Auerbach. The continual attack of the paintwork is always aiming to hold, freeze, pin down an image and a presence, but the provisional, fleeting nature of the finished images acknowledge the futility of the quest. This show is well worth seeing as an overall installation.
