VISUAL ARTS:THE TITLE OF David Godbold's Kerlin Gallery exhibition, Art, Drugs and Prayer, is characteristic in its heterogeneous mixture of apparently disconnected areas of experience. He ascribes the formula to Charles Baudelaire, who thought escape from the "grey flats of the everyday" might be afforded by recourse to a combination of art, prayer and drugs, together generating a "spiritual" experience.
The show falls into two parts. On the lower floor, two walls are densely packed with small-scale framed drawings, while the main gallery space upstairs is more sparingly hung with mostly large-scale paintings or, more accurately perhaps, drawings on canvas.
At least some of the framed drawings look familiar and all follow a format he devised a few years ago, juxtaposing found pieces of paper bearing texts of some kind, whether printed or handwritten with overdrawn images quoted from classical sources, often featuring religious iconography (comic books and other pop-culture sources have also figured large), together with his own textual interpolations which are, in turn, frequently quoted from various sources, together with his own off-the-cuff remarks. Phew. There is, as you might expect, a garrulous quality to these works, particularly when encountered en masse, as the artist clearly intends. The effect is of receiving several layers and categories of information at once.
They all interact, but consistent trends do emerge. Extreme religious imagery, once seriously didactic in intent, is irreverently undercut by the knowing, informal commentary, which functions a bit like the marginalia in illuminated manuscripts. Intimations of transcendence are brought down to earth, which is very much what happens in the works on canvas as well. They are, intriguingly, taken from generic, apocryphal landscapes by 16th and 17th century Belgian and Flemish artists including Joachim Patiner, Paul Bril, several of the Van de Cock family (given Godbold's sense of humour, their name might account for some of their appeal), and Joos de Monper.
These artists worked within sets of formulaic constraints.
Godbold has generally gone for a specific pictorial type, the "world landscape", largely devised by Patiner (an anagramatically apposite name) distinguished by a high viewpoint and horizon and a surprisingly strict colour arrangement with a brownish foreground giving way to green middle ground and blue background. There's lots of visual incident in the form of vertiginous craggy peaks and outcrops, trees and castles. Godbold makes loose graphic transcriptions of the landscapes, using the conventions of illustration. He often zeroes in on religious symbols, highlighting them in some way.
In a way, Godbold's work is an ongoing conversation with different forms of representational convention and belief systems. He is drawn to the artificiality of the visual language of the landscapes, but he also re-casts them in an equally stylised form, describing a circularity. Our only point of egress, he implies, the one way we can avoid being trapped in limiting conventions, is by subverting the notional integrity of the vocabulary of any particular system, using pastiche, parody and disruptive commentary.
LAURA FITZGERALD'S For our house is our corner of the world is a mixed-media exhibition at the Talbot Gallery and Studios and her first solo show (she graduated from NCAD last year). Her work is conceptually and formally strong. It is based on our ideas of home and family in terms of both memory and anticipation. That is, the way we learn to move on from a nurturing space and perhaps project its qualities on to the wider world. Hot-air balloons become a symbol for cutting loose and setting off into the unknown.
Fitzgerald is versatile in terms of materials and techniques and has a way of coming up with unexpected solutions. Nothing lasts forever . . . is an installation in which a wall is studded with a series of miniature domestic rooms, furnished with ghostly white fittings. There is a sense of packing up and clearing out, and the way the rooms are separated from each other, arranged in an irregular pattern, makes them seem like individual vignettes. It's beautifully done. A series of intricate ink drawings uses a similar strategy in a different way, presenting us with a mass of disparate scenes. Their meandering narrative quality recalls Stephen Brandes's graphic family sagas.
Other sculptural pieces are impressive and one of them, Ruined World, is brilliant. It consists of a revolving globe suspended from the ceiling, its surface made from torn fragments of old wallpaper and other debris evocative of a crumbling domestic interior. The shapes and textures suggest a map of the world. It's a haunting piece of work.
Art, Drugs and Prayer, David Godbold, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until Oct 18; For our house is our corner of the world, Laura Fitzgerald. Talbot Gallery and Studios, Dublin, until Sep 26
