Visual Arts:ReviewedZip Code, Norbert Schwontkowski, Kerlin Gallery until Apr 28 (01-6709093)Michael Canning, recent paintings, Hallward Gallery until Apr 21 (01-6621482)Celtic Vision John Bellany, Solomon Gallery until May 2 (01-6794237)Albert Irvin, new works, Peppercanister Gallery until Apr 28 (01-6611279)
Norbert Schwontkowski's paintings, in his exhibition Zip Code at the Kerlin Gallery, are muted and greyish, fragmentary representational images shot through with a kind of ennui and hesitancy that is characteristic of a veritable genre of contemporary European painting. Schwontkowski was born in Bremen in 1949 and, while he has been an influential teacher, with several of his ex-students achieving notable success in the art world, his own work has only relatively recently received widespread attention.
Understandably, perhaps, for it is by its nature almost self-deprecating. His artistic virtues - a felicitous sense of touch, wry philosophical humour, a distinctive, subdued lyricism bordering on melancholy - hardly advertise themselves. Yet the paintings are persuasive. By treading a fine line between pathos and bathos, he manages to get away with what might otherwise be taken as grandiloquent pictorial statements.
The full-blown romanticism of the image of a diminutive protagonist confronting the terrifying vastness of the universe - a recurrent subject - might seem simply over-the-top if it wasn't counterbalanced by a cartoon-like study of a paunchy man in his underpants scouring the fridge for a snack.
He's not much of a romantic figure, perhaps, but his predicament is essentially the same as more highfalutin types. The background context in the paintings is a kind of floating nowhere, like a Casper David Friedrich landscape from which all orientation, and all consolatory faith, has ebbed away. What is left is a nostalgia for faith, perhaps, and feelings of loss and dislocation.
Schwontkowski's work is promiscuously eclectic and iconographically rich, which is something that people tend to like. It's also something that can be misleading, inviting a disproportionate emphasis on interpreting pictures purely in terms of their narrative content. Just as relevant are his knowing use of various modes of representation, and the physical constitution of his canvases.
The grounds, composed of a singular combination of materials, are redolent of age, corrosion and depletion. They are more residues than clean slates. For the most part, he adopts an impoverished form of figuration, rendering things in a rudimentary cartoon idiom or with childlike naivety. Often it can seem he just hasn't the energy or the motivation to fully articulate an image ("I can't go on," he might as well say), which adds to the general air of desolation. The more you look, though, the more it becomes clear that he also enjoys quoting other, more sophisticated modes of representation, and he has become cannily eloquent in his use of a strictly limited technical vocabulary. At his best, the effects can be magical and metaphysical.
In his paintings at the Hallward Gallery, Michael Canning adheres with exceptional resolution to a single pictorial scheme, one he has pursued for some time now. The only variation comes when he doubles up his images in diptychs. Each individual image features a botanically exact, stylised representation of a wild flower, which springs in isolation from a dark foreground space. Beyond, a patchwork of fields recedes into the distance, usually fading into mist. Above, large flocks of birds fly in extensive formations.
Titles refer to composers and Irish saints. Canning builds his images with glazes of oil paint and wax. Their surfaces are incredibly smooth and polished, even glassy, but the impulse toward perfection is thwarted by inbuilt scrapes and blemishes, as though we are looking at things not newly made but already old, in keeping with the work's generally retrospective, elegiac air.
There are several references to orderly systems in the paintings: the patterns assumed by the birds in flight, the grid-like division of the landscape into fields, the evocation of botanical classification in the carefully descriptive accounts of the plants. Yet, apropos the latter, while Canning is an exact observer, perhaps pointedly he doesn't name the plants or sort them into taxonomic groupings, but instead anchors the paintings to other, subjective personal experiences.
In fact he relishes the arbitrary way the wild flowers catch his attention - and there is the fact that they are wild, naturally occurring and in some cases regarded as weeds. One can discern an ongoing dialogue concerning nature and culture, order and disorder, pattern and amorphousness, all underpinned by a moody reflectiveness, and the paintings are, incidentally, beautifully made.
Two veteran painters, John Bellany and Albert Irvin, happen to have shows running in Dublin at the moment. Bellany is Scottish and Irvin English, and over the years they have built up warm relationships with Ireland. Both exhibitions are very strong.
Bellany, whose Celtic Visions is at the Solomon, is a narrative painter whose work is fundamentally autobiographical and often allegorical. He comes from the small fishing community of Port Seton, and the sea and mortality, something inescapably associated with fishing, have been constants in his paintings.
Besides which, he has been face to face with his own mortality more than once, having received a liver transplant in 1989, and being "technically dead for 10 minutes" after a heart attack last June.
Hardly surprising, perhaps, that there is a brooding, introspective atmosphere to his recent work. Well, relatively speaking, for he is someone whose relish for life comes through in his painting, and it does so here. His style is graphic and highly coloured. The recent paintings muse on life, death and relationships, and they record extensive travels, from Kerry to China. Although the palette is typically bright, his use of colour is slightly muddier than heretofore which, as it happens, works very well. Bellany can also take an absolutely straight genre, like still life, and work wonders with it. The still lifes in the show are really terrific.
Irvin is an abstract painter who also works with bright, intense colour, engineering dynamic compositions with layers of vibrant acrylic or gouache. He employs favoured motifs - parallel bands, boxes, quatrefoils - in exceptionally busy, buoyant compositions that positively sing with energy. Everything depends on Irvin pitching it perfectly, and he does, with tremendous verve and a great eye for colour.
