Although he is now in his 80th year, the name of the American painter, Thomas Chimes, is not familiar. This may be partly because he is a non-conformist by nature. Studying at the Art Students' League in New York in the 1950s, under the G.I. Bill, he decided that the prevailing trend towards Abstract Expressionism in American painting was not for him. Then, coinciding with the international return to figurative painting in the 1980s, he began to veer towards abstraction. But, in fact, this apparently wilful disregard for artistic fashion doesn't really account for his relative obscurity. Most American painters in the 1950s plugged away at figuration, and abstraction may not have been altogether in vogue but certainly didn't disappear during the 1980s.
The truth seems to be that Chimes is one of those artists with an inward-looking, hermetic, even eccentric, temperament. The American critic, Donald Kuspit, observes that he identifies with Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu Roi and "inventor of Pataphysics, the outlandish make-believe `Science of Exceptions' ". And the two complementary bodies of work that make up Chimes's RHA Gallagher Gallery exhibition, Portraying Ideas, are shot through with a quality of abstruse intellectual game-playing and an apparently personal symbolism. So much so that Kuspit's identification of Chimes as "a neo-Symbolist" seems spot on.
There are a number of iconic portraits of writers and thinkers in the show, including images of Jarry and also of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe and others. These works revisit the turn of the 19th century with an in-built layer of nostalgia. The small sepia-toned paintings are clearly taken from photographic sources, and are heavily mounted in varnished wood frames. Kuspit suggests that Chimes is interested in early explorers of the unconscious.
These works lead on to the second body of paintings, usually white, subtly inscribed with geometric devices and obscure fragments of meticulously handwritten text. They suggest a world of arcane learning and secret knowledge, and they are beautifully made, though their meanings remain obscure.
For Chimes, Kuspit says, whiteness symbolises the mystery of consciousness, and quotes him: "The white explains nothing, but simply points to the mystery, as if to say: `There it is.' " Thus, the key to the work is the idea that, from the dark, murky sepia of the unconscious to the opaque milky light of consciousness, Chimes is paying tribute to (rather than offering explanations about) the central mysteries of life.
The playful atmosphere of Aidan McDermott's Morphic Landscapes at the Rubicon recalls the mock-heroics of Scottish painter Steven Campbell's boy scout-like adventurers in Discovering Insects in a Herbaceous Border, one of the more humorous, self-mocking manifestations of 1980s painting. McDermott is one of a number of artists who went to art college towards the end of the 1980s and, while avoiding the hype that attended Neo-Expressionism, picked up on the revived fortunes of painting, taking it in new directions throughout the last decade or so.
His Morphic Landscapes are light years ahead of the Morphic Heads that made up his last show. The heads, painted renditions of caricaturish plasticine models, were pointlessly repetitive and a bit dull. McDermott is still painting models, but this time, spurred initially by a stay at Ballycastle on the north Mayo coast, courtesy of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, he has constructed elaborate model landscapes incorporating toys and real objects as well as plasticine. He has then photographed the results and worked from the photographs.
This greatly expanded miseen-scene allows him to devise quasi-narratives with toy figures that are oddly but strongly resonant of cinematic imagery and, more deliberately, of art history, with recurrent references to Bocklin's Isle of the Dead. Poussin used to make elaborate theatrical models of his magisterial landscape compositions, though admittedly McDermott works in a different vein, freely mingling pop and high art motifs and relishing the layers of artifice built into each image. Could there be a serious message lurking there, about the theme-park recycling of nature? There may well be, but McDermott is no moralist, and you feel he rather likes the hybridised world that his pictures ingeniously reflect.
An art college contemporary of McDermott's, Ciaran O Cearnaigh, is currently showing The Mons Paintings at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin. The first impression of these works is of a striking installation composed of a series of sombre, minimalist monochromatic canvases. The colours never stray far from muted, earthy hues. Up close, it's evident that each work is built from a series of regular horizontal bands which look as if they've been printed onto a painted background, and that turns out to be pretty much the case. As the show's title suggests, the distinctly cenotaphic quality of the works and the presentation is no accident.
The Mons Paintings were made during the course of a residency at Mons in Belgium under the "Pepiniere" programme for young European artists. The endlessly reiterated horizontal bands that make up each overall monolithic composition refer to the local war cemeteries, where the bodies of the men of the Irish regiments, including the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the 16th Division and the Connaught Rangers, who fought and perished during the first World War, are buried. In appearance, O Cearnaigh's work bears some similarity to Shane Cullen's ritualistic tabulation of the republican hunger strikers' communications, though the impression of mute, voiceless uniformity that he generates, and a sense of numbingly huge casualty figures, are appropriate to his meditative evocation of war dead. The only false note is the superfluous suggestion, in a note accompanying the exhibition, that the repeat-pattern images resemble "African patterns" and "in so doing evoke Belgium's colonial past". Give us a break.
