VISUAL ART: One of the art reviewer's classic dodges is to say that such and such a work exhibits contradictory qualities, that it is, for example, both empty and full, or ironic and sincere, or clumsy and sophisticated. The net result is to say nothing much at all about the work, or at least to save the reviewer from the dreaded option of actually offering a value judgment. Best to be cautious, then, about proposing the idea that Billy Foley's paintings and drawings, at the Fenton Gallery in Cork, could be described a
Reviewed: Billy Foley, Fenton Gallery, Cork , until March 12th (021-4315294)
Rather than let the work disappear into the convenient space between these contradictory qualities, let's suggest how and why both might apply. For the most part, Foley works comfortably on a large scale. In fact, unlike many artists, he has no particular problems about moving up or down in scale.
You can see at a glance that his work is freely gestural. The surfaces are composed of busy rhythmic tangles of ribbons, swirls and thick masses of brush-strokes or, in the case of the drawings, strokes of charcoal, Conté crayon and perhaps eraser. There are tonal blocks of paint, but line is the dominant element. They are not representational works, but the nearest visual equivalents in representational terms are probably views of trees and hedgerows against the winter sky.
The marks on canvas and paper directly convey the gestural movements of hand, wrist and arm. Overall they amount to a pictorial language that usually comes with the tag "expressionist" attached. Yet, particularly when you consider more than one work, it becomes clear that Foley operates within precisely defined parameters and, once you appreciate these parameters, the appropriateness of the expressionist tag becomes more and more questionable.
It is more a case that the complexities of the finished pieces are generated by the application of a consistent developmental pattern to a set of relatively simple initial conditions, all of which amounts to a fairly controlled process. While the spontaneity and freedom seemingly embodied in the paintings and drawings are certainly there, they are achieved not on the basis of randomness but via the operation of a few consistent, rigorously applied rules regarding colour, the kind of gesture and mark with which to apply it, and an intuitive sense of a desired or permitted level of complexity.
In a catalogue interview, Foley refers to his interest in the physical sciences, and there is also a note by physicist Colm O'Sullivan pointing out the two-way relevance of science to work and vice-versa. Various aspects of scientific theory are relevant, for example, to Foley's interest in the way simple rules and identical beginnings can result in limitless diversity. And to such ideas as taking a bunch of unruly phenomena and endowing them with coherence by virtue of their underlying generative processes or, equally, to a vision of the world as endless process, allowing the interchangeability not only of forms of matter, from stars to human bodies, but also of matter and energy.
The paintings and drawings buzz with a sense of potentiality that really does convey the excitement of looking at chaos and tuning in to an underlying coherence. It could be argued that Foley's method and imagery aspire to generate pictorial analogies of the way the prodigality and randomness of nature become comprehensible through the application of scientific ideas; the way the apparently anomalous can make sense within the framework of an explanatory theory, and can even bolster the theory.
ONE of the chief influences on some of Foley's earlier work was a remarkable group of paintings by Willem de Kooning, made in the late 1970s and often unfairly dismissed as manifesting the early stages of decline. Foley has usefully absorbed other influences in the meantime and, to his credit, he has developed certain aspects of de Kooning's painting, particularly relating to the notion of coherence in diversity.
On balance, while the paintings are admirably uncompromising and open, the drawings are more fully achieved, more mature. In fact, many of the paintings come across as being quasi-drawings, with their emphasis on line and copious amounts of untouched white ground showing through. Nothing wrong with that, and it should be said that they are pretty convincing works, but perhaps there is a more fully resolved body of paintings down the line.
Foley has never shown signs of possessing a subtle colour sense - one suspects that colour might be something he could work on a little. But on the other hand he does have a bold, utilitarian attitude to colour. Throughout these paintings, for example, he uses a dark brown and a muddy blue that are businesslike rather than appealing, but they do suit the pared-down, survival-of-the-fittest spirit that operates in the paintings. In the end, what comes across is a feeling that these are works that engage enthusiastically and inventively with the tangled complexity of the world in terms of process and appearance.
Billy Foley's paintings and drawings are at the Fenton Gallery, Wandeford Quay, Cork until Mar 12 (021-4315294)
