JAMES CASTLE @ DOUGLAS HYDE

Could this guy write? I thought he couldn't, well there's a lot of writing in this show, but its still difficult to know because what is there is either copied from logotypes or weird letter-ish symbols, its kinda great because it shows how biographical detail becomes helpful in decoding how this guy's work uh worked and how it becomes weirdly more expansive than private through the pile up of these weird codings. For that to work tho u do need to kno a little abt how this guy. He was deaf and he had v. little schooling and almost never left Idaho I think. He never learned to read or write or speak and the weird scraps of drawings in this show are a selection of the one method he had of communicating with the world.

Okay so I wasn't buying that line first, becoz the first thing u c r all these family portrait things only with weird box ppl and its a bit, well, this kinda "ppl r strange 2 me" narrative is exactly what puts most ppl off abt "outsider art" isn't it? turning mental patients, hillbillies and chimpanzees into weird cyphers and mouthpieces of our id r whatever, u kno, the standard this-is-offensive line. But they're just one thing and the rest of the exhibition is great in a way that kinda dismantles that early criticism which is really just caffeine+opinions lets be honest here.

I'm not gonna launch into some lengthy exposition of why i fucking love writing-in-painting lately, but that reciprocation and disconnection between two different functions of markmaking is really interesting to me at the moment so it was definitely the strategy that led me into this and not just jumping on some reactionary stance just for the sake of it. But at the same time its not really something I can talk abt right now in shortform because I'm digesting my thots on this in a big way in larger form atm so I'm just gonna leave it for now and you're gonna have to take it from me that there is something going on here that is clever and knowing, and its abt an interest in language that is complex and fragmentary and ambivalent and that the two drawings of letters are stuttering and nicely played but work in a stratum just beneath words so you should really just see them tbh.

Highlight of the show though are these really great little landscapes, done i suppose in the artist's spit 'n' ashes ink. Nearly all of the same small-town backyard setting they walk a thin line between claustrophobic n intimite but moreso are really fascinating just for their dense compositions, the way eaves of rooftops sing with telephone wires from and lines that lock and groove out from each other in a way that is both incredibly fluent and anxiously groping. Also the dense tangles of patchy brushland, the nervous neatness of well kept lawns, everything seems expressive in its own silence. I nearly forgot to mention the interiors that seem incredibly descriptive of watery light filling a room from a few feet away, but up close are nearly crude and childish, this is pretty much the weird condition of this whole show tho.

Also shit like drawing on crappy old scraps of paper will get u very far in my books and this had really cool frames that hooked on at the sides in this weird way and were all cool and super minimalist in this great way when contrasted with the delicacy of the falling-apart, yellowing notepaper and scraps of things that Castle used for supports including these genuinely fucking weird doll things that I wanna see again b4 i die! I hope I get to go back in time for the Mike Nelson thing anyway, I'm perennially semi curious abt him u kno.

random dublin stuff

Group show of kevin kavanagh was good, def worth it to see the Mark Swords paintings, the one called quilt made me crack up! Also, I had never heard of Margaret Corcoran before, one of hers was rubbish, the other great. I can't find the list of works so I can't remember which was which, but it was the smaller of the two, with a plaque-like shiny surface.

I would have more for this post, but once again pallas projects and mothers tankstation weren't open. Fair enough MT are showing a film twice a day so they're only open for showings, I should have checked it out, but I won't bother going back to Pallace Projects because I feel like a right dick waiting outside to be let in and then realising nobody's coming, again. its not exactly conveniently located.

Also, I'm gonna blog someday soon about my undying love for Agnes Martin, and my plans for a pilgrimage to her life that i'm paying for one cappuccino at a time working in a coffee shop, but I just wanna mention the Ellsworth Kelly - Agnes Martin - Seán Shanahan trio of paintings that are part of the current display of the permanent collection at Hugh Lane. I fucking amazing treat for me. It was a pretty great day all in all as I did manage to see the paintings in the Ross O'Donnell show I had to miss at Cross Gallery, they were stacked in the downstairs gallery and I had a rummage, I know I prolly shouldn't have but its not like they're old masters and it was totally worth it.

ALICE MAHER @ GREEN ON RED

Ok I figure ur supposed to have an opinion on this exhibition. First time I've ever seen another person in this gallery while I was there, and there was like six. And its been on a while. tbh I never really got what was supposed to make this chick any better than the girls I used to see copping her moves at art-school and I don't know if this show is gonna be the one to change my mind.

First off this seemed okay. There were framed prints made from the animations which comprise the main bulk of the exhibition. I wondered about how they left in the rubbed out bits somehow. I wish I knew more abt printmaking processes sometimes.

So Alice Maher's schtick is like this queasy dissection of the body and she's obsessed with hair, but beyond that, I really didn't know what I was meant to extrapolate from this exhibition. When William Kentridge does the one page animation thing, its abt histories that can't be erased maybe, when Maher does it she just seems to be exploiting its inherent visual seductiveness. Bodies morph, mutate, merge and disolve, turning into bees and balls of hair and the sound is close mic-ed and uncomfortable in its detail. There's a level of skill in the drawing (even if her faces are a bit awkward and junior-cert-ey at times) but there's not a whole lot of um variation in how she makes the mutations happen. Like, you won't be mad at yourself for trekking out to see this, but I doubt you'll be that into it either, but then what do I know.

ISABEL NOLAN @ KERLIN GALLERY

You know those shops that sell vaguely modernist home decor art? You know, half assed appropriations of Abstract Expressionism only in shades that will match your new couch. Well that's what this exhibition kinda reminded me of. I don't mind that, in fact I think its kinda funny! It's the reverse of making paintings that look like dulux color cards, fine art refiltering itself thru its own appropriation by um Ikea maybe. Nolan gives you stacks of Tuttle-octagons, watercolours of Degas sculptures and Munch sunsets. Wished there was more focus on painting, the sculptures do have a roughly hewn precision and a funky, eclectic use of materials, but Nolan does have nice, insouciant touch and her bright primaries are strained and stretched at the edges in a way that sets up its own tensions, distinct from the appropriated compositions. Also, embroidery tables? Give me a break, shit's been done really.

am i right in saying

that the last three cover stars of modern painters were patti smith, tim burton and pharrell?

ross mc donnell

I don't really know what Cros Gallery's deal is. They've had a couple of kickass shows lately mixed with a few mediocre ones. This one looks fucking great, wish it was on for more than 18 days because I might not get to actually see it. (I had plans to make it up next thursday, but it looks like that might not happen now, hmmm). Yeah, work and etc. Anyway, I feel like I should give this a mention anyway because at least from the jpegs this looks great. Messy and funny and with weird colours, dude streaks thick lines over anemic smears of paint, parts are collaged, pieces of imagery are reconfigured and put back together in ways that seem askew and lackadaisical. I like the slacker aesthetic, but it also seems like it masks something more methodical that I can't really put my finger on (duh, was hoping seeing them in the flesh would give me a clue!)

Anyway, its nice to see that this kind of abstraction is being done by younger painters, it feels like it has definite roots in 70's abstract painting, but thankfully doesn't feel like it needs to update the politics of that era, instead the introductions of imagery on the periphery of the optical register feels like a shrug in the direction of having something to look at, I like that, these are obviously abstract paintings, but they kinda flirt around with imagery and pictorial space in an easy-going and charming way. What I mean to say is its not exactly "the message" or whatever that is so appealing, but the tone of voice. You get the feeling you could hang out with this guy.



Over washed Nirvana T-Shirt translates faded worn cotton and that lame t-shirt everyone had in school (I fucking love nirvana but that t-shirt is stupid imo) you know, the one with the crooked smile, and hastily reassembles it as scribbled-in patches of greenish black oil paint, the outlines are the pinkish underpainting smeared up onto the top surface of the paint. A big theme is maybe a tension between different pictorial surfaces and redepictions of them, in which case a t-shirt is really, i dunno clever? Would like to see as well how these play out with the relationships between different layers of paint, large parts seem like they operate more in terms of obscuring what's beneath them than projecting outwards which is a great idea maybe, because the markmaking itself seems pretty bold but the emphasis is inward. Anyway its hard to know just from some jpegs so you should check it out urself and let me know if i'm onto something haha.

Kindof annoyed that I can't get out to any exhibitions until at least the week after next, my two days off next week r on rubbish days. Some nice looking pretentious stuff in Mother's Tankstation, slideshow thingy maybe. I was looking forward to seeing that exhibition they had on in the Glucksman but it looks like flooding is keeping it shut. As far as i recall there were aren't any galleries on the ground floor tho, just toilets and a lecture hall so I assume no artworks have been damaged. Anyway, it sucks.

Update:

ok so obv i was way off on the "not artworks damaged" theory and this is obviously a really shitty thing to happen, still there is a joke here about leaky modernist buildings somewhere. Hope they're up n running again soon tho!

Jeanne Claude RIP

In Case You Didn't know that today is Peter Gabriel appreciation day!

You do now!

GALLERY BEAT!

Hahahahahahaha! I would love to have the balls/complete lack of self-consciousness to do shit like this, well maybe not really. This is kinda the tone I'm going for in this blog by the way, just a blog that is about actually going to shows and having a reaction and thinking about that a little, no holy mountain bs here ppl!

http://gallerybeat.net/

The video of Stephen Irwin's opening is getting a lot of internet buzz, largely due to the fact that Paul H-O calls Cathy Lebowitz, Cindy (dude dated Cindy Sherman for like a long time and made that movie that u prolly haven't seen either) and then gets her to describe some sexually [im/ex]plicit imagery.

galerie graesslin

there's something really sad and camp and damaged about Stefan Muller, not sure abt these compared to his Christian Nagel show last year which had glitter and bleach and markers. I have a feeling that all of his work is a lot more detailed and beautiful in real life than these jpegs will let u know, someone who I hope I see a show by pretty soon.

this was orig. a post about stefan muller but holy shit has this gallery got one hell of a roster! also never seen these Imi Knoebel's before and I'm freaking out a little at them, look at this for a pallette!

Also, on top of that their showing Gunther Forg who was the one glowing beacon of awesomeness amid the Frieze fair when I went in 2008 (not a mistake I will make again btw), turns out I fucking hate art fairs btw.

maybe i should say something here about how

Limerick is like full of unemployed art students with studios EVERYWHERE.

i have a major boner for

Stephen Westfall's giddy formalism. Fucking chevrons man. One of those painters whose work is so simple and formalist and weirdly original, ingeniously simple formal games that surely someone must have thought of before but you just can't place.

NOUGHTIES BUT NICE @ LCGA

This was obviously never gonna really work as a broad survey of contemporary Irish art, but seriously get one clue Limerick City Gallery. Even the Seán Lynch was pretty rubbish. Amanda Coogan should be banned from inflicting her rubbish overly literal performance videos on the world in my opinion and also since when is over the hill nearly ran John Shinnors an emerging voice? Limerick City Gallery reeks of the kind of cronyism that all the american painter blogs are crucifying NY's New Museum for at the moment. Good thing this thing is almost over so you can miss it.

Update.

This has been extended until 20th December, so you have another month to be excited by irish art NOW.

A few other things from Dublin

What is the deal with the Cross Gallery, they always have semi-cool stuff downstairs and boring mom-art upstairs, well the two times I've been there. I think downstairs might be called "nag" and be their emerging art things maybe. Anyway, downstairs is worth a look, but I'm too lazy to go into it right now, long day, etc.

Are Monster truck ever open?

I liked the thing I saw in green on red, there was one drawing done by scratching out a mirror and another done by printing on the back of reflective Glass, space used really nicely to show big silvery video, drawings were pretty great. This was it btw.

Went to the Munch exhibition in the National Gallery. Didn't think I was a huge fan, but holy shit could he draw!

Kathy Predergast in the Kerlin was a bit disappointing, was a bit like a third year crit, esp. with douchebaggy NCAD seminar taking place there. Reminded me why I was so glad to finish art school haha. Lots of stuff with inked out maps, not as compelling as here map drawings and seemed a bit tossed off to be honest.

I liked the thing that was about sports maybe in the RHA with the big sculpture, some of the paintings were really stunning and the whole thing had a snottiness about it that in a weird way reminded me of Infinite Jest (which I will one day finish I swear). Hadn't a clue what it was about though.

I knew Mother's Tankstation was gonna be closed but I still checked cos I am a loser like that. Love that place, hope I catch the next thing that opens.

That's pretty much all I can remember, but I have a feeling I'm forgetting some stuff.

Tulca 2009

The Tulca festival is held every year around Galway city. I suppose it's very similar in ambition to ev+a, organised annually around Limerick by the City Gallery there. Like ev+a, it pushes a programme based around video, installation and performance and using spaces outside the traditional art spaces. I've been feeling a really good vibe about Galway's art scene lately but these multimedia festivals tend to leave me a little cold for some reason so I just decided to go in to this with no preconceptions.

They didn't advertise opening night on the website, a shame because the free wine was pretty good for free wine, but a friend of mine was volunteering and we had decided met up to go drinking after. But yeah, it was in what used to be Habitat and it did a good job for the night of pretending to be a hip space in berlin r something. There was some neon on the wall and a video where some chick dumps her baby in a drawer by the side of the road (?) and for some reason all the kids seemed to be watching the slideshow of violent scenes which was pretty funny. Yeah okay I wasn't really paying attention.

Today on my lunch break I headed over to St. Nicholas where they were showing some small pieces that were really hard to find and the invigilator kindof had a fulltime job pointing them out to people. Must have been hard for her as I'd say she pointed out a video of an ear hidden under a grate to more than one tourist/person there to pray. Also some drawings that I didn't like, didn't really get this at all and it seemed a bit half formed/assed to be honest.

Also G126, this was pretty funny. I spent the bus home thinking I was gonna say something like "when did google maps become a universal signifier of planning your holiday?" and try and be all clever and knowing about it, but really I just thought this show was quite sweet. Like the raw materials were just the things that you google the night you book your flights, but it was pieced together with fun references from Steve Reich to Felix Gonzalez Torres. A big crinkled google printout of the atlantic, a stack of postcards, a video of a currach, upside down and probably fed through youtube at some point. Highlight for me was the one where they layered a line from "Galway Bay" from about as many versions as he could find on iTunes I'm guessing. Really woozy and beautiful and cute in its copping of 60's tape music. A good show, it made its concerns sculptural, assembling ideas about travel in actual spatial constructions, more than just a neat trick in my opinion.

I also legged it around the Arts Centre but they were closing and it looked boring.

OLIVER COMERFORD @ KEVIN KAVANAGH

Okay so this isn't something I'd normally go for, and by the time I got here I was wet and cold and it was getting late and I still hadn't even made it to IMMA yet and I confess, I zipped around it pretty quickly. I like Kevin Kavanagh, its a really corporate looking building in a poncey development with a Radisson. It feels like a proper upmarket gallery, like a gagosian or something. The space itself is quite nice, its hard to define exactly but the office is there but not intrusive, the bit with the guestbook provides a little room to show a smaller intimate work and yet the inner gallery is a very versatile size.

Oliver Comerford, I'd never come across him before I think, seems to specialise in large photo-based paintings. Wait come back, this isn't some "ghosts of history" Luc Tuymans played out thing, and it doesn't play on the romance celluloid fetishism. It just reminds me of glancing out a bus window as the light starts to fade. There is a definite sense of Irish Countryside, Light, and a delicately and intricately structured casualness. Its not the most glamorous trick to pull off, and it seems unlikely to win him any kudos but then, Maureen Gallace is an art star now so who knows. Anyway this was nice and I'm glad I saw it, even if I didn't care too much when I was there.

just to say

This is fucking awesome

Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy, chanelling Max Ochs.

PHILLIPE PARRENO @ IMMA

This was kind of fun. Just a good old fashioned head fuck in my opinion. Okay there were easy points made on the deconstructive potential of cultural detritus but I was more interested in how it used the space, activated it, moved around it. The voice of the woman from the video piece that echoed and careened through the rooms of the gallery The yellowing of the windows and the shiny things. It was a bit empty, but it was entertaining, and you could see the whole thing in a few minutes. Great info sheet too, like a randomly torn page from one of those Phaidon books.

LYNDA BENGLIS @ IMMA

Feel like there's an essay in the works on this one, so I'll keep it brief here. This was a great show and one of the reasons that IMMA have been restoring a lot of my previous faith in them after a dodgy couple of years. Lynda Benglis, best known for her ARTFORUM ad featuring her wearing nothing but sunglasses and an, um, dildo, emerged as a figure from the New York Painting Scene of the late 60's early 70's. Thankfully this period has overgone a huge reappraisal in recent years with figures as diverse as Mary Heilmann and Joan Mitchell re-emerging as important and influential. Benglis' work from this period is aggressively feminist in rhetoric, but in its lush materialism and sly disruption of formalism, seems to anticipate queer 90's artists Felix Gonzalez Torres (pro tip for blog readers, if I align anybody with FGT it means I am about to say I like them) and Roni Horn.

I suppose it would be suitable to cite Robert Morris or Judy Chicago, both artists whose awareness of the gendered rhetoric of Minimalism in particular informed their work (Chicago, before she embraced large installations on feminist themes, made quietly prettified Minimalist sculpture) Neither of these artists approached the formal subversion of Benglis though, her flamboyant and gaudy sculptures deconstruct the maleness of the previous decades of american art, the ejaculations of Jackson Pollock and the cool supermensch boy-toys of minimalism, and remake them as bawdy, excessive and bodacious visions of camp femaleness.

Working with latex, wax, plaster, glitter and vibrant acrylics, much of the show has the appearance of Mardi-Gras float casualties (especially due to the repeated use of chicken wire to give many sculptures structure) But it is in this free-floating garishness that the artist stumbles across her radicalness, her affront to bourgeois tastefulness. While her work is lacking in the nuance and subtlety of Mary Heilmann, it makes up for it with sheer willpower. Considering how long it has taken this period of recent history to become canonised, her aggressiveness seems justified yet how odd to think that in a world where Warhol was the most famous living artist, that it took so long for this post-pop abstraction to gain respectability. Still, it is in its persistant un respectability that this show is so much fun, in all its kinky, rubbery trashiness.

Dublin Artist Run Spaces

Okay so there's Pallas Projects but I'm sure there must be more. I fucking love these places, they're always alternating between an overly-friendly community outreach vibe and unfriendly scenesterism. They show stuff that most ppl probably wouldn't really consider art, and tend to be quite difficult to find, yes artist-run-spaces are what I'm talking about. I visited Pallas projects and it took about five minutes to actually get in the door (after walking so far I was determined) and ended up being let in a side door and having to stumble over a bicycle.

These places are great because they don't really expect anybody is ever going to visit them, and I don't blame them. You have to stoop below a sculpture seemingly made from that accordion-type piping that ppl attatch to their tumble dryers to direct the steam out through the window. The space is dominated by two video pieces, one of two cameras pointed at each other, one of a bored-looking girl dangling from the ceiling while occasionally just-as-disinterested visitors mill around her with an expression split between puzzlement and resignment.

Obviously I love this kindof stuff. It makes me happy that there is still systems and a commitment to ppl being silly and making things nobody is interested in for the sake of art! I know this might come across as sarcasm, but these places really do live up to their purported purpose as an alternative to the glossiness of commercial galleries and the canon-building of the museums. I'd be pleased to be given the skinny on any alternative art happenings around the country, I have days off and don't mind bus trips if I can! Hit me up on standardseriesblog@gmail.com

painting abstraction - possible gift idea u guys!

anyone who wants to send me a copy of this is more than welcome btw!

Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas is out now, and includes from the sounds of it a lot information culled from studio visits and interviews with many painters including StandardSeries faves Mary Heilmann and Richard Aldrich. Interview with Bob Nickas in Art In America gives u the basic steez.

FRANCIS BACON @ HUGH LANE

The problem with the Francis Bacon exhibition in Hugh Lane is that it kindof confirms everything I suspected I didn't like about the painter. Ambitiously staged with many works on loan from private collections and museums, especially the Tate, the exhibition also makes use of the vast store of research materials, photographs and drawings held by the gallery.

Okay, so I started at the wrong side, and was harried around by impatient stewards and guards from my point of entry on (despite entering more than 20 mins before the advertised closing time, wtf?) but I'm sure I'll have at least one more chance to see this show again before it closes. Major Props to the curators who seem to have dissected entire working practice down into its constituent parts, making up the pieces of the puzzle from torn and modified photographs, drawings and reproductions torn from art books.

The first thing that started to bother me was the type of transference we were supposed to feel by looking at certain images in this context. Was looking at the Muybridge repros different here than it was when I leafed through the copy of The Human Figure in Motion held in the Library in college. In both instances the impetus was Bacon, but whereas originally I was drawn to the images on their own terms, here I felt I was being called to infer from these images something latent which would find its real expression in the paintings which are held tantalisingly at bay in the inner rooms of the exhibition. Maybe if the exhibition had only included those Muybridge photographs (whose intended orig purpose was more scientific than artistic) and those photographs which Bacon commissioned as working material. It gets onto much shakier ground when it starts displaying Old Master reproductions.

Having spent four years in art college as a painter I know full well the need and value of surrounding yourself with work that interests and influences you, hell its this impulse that has led to this blog. But it troubled me when I spent a few minutes once again admiring a Michaelangelo drawing, but once again I felt like it was being proposed that I dwell on these as though they were the raw materials of Bacon's art as opposed to the endlessly compelling works of art they themselves are. I don't want to digress too much into Ways of Seeing territory here, but the torn reproductions and smudges of paint that adorned these drawings, in this instance seemed an insinuation of ownership of some kind. It reminded me of the reservations expressed by my art history lecturer and, I'm sure, many more people over the display of the artist's studio on permanent display in the same gallery. Contained in a chilling central chamber, the studio is preserved in detailed accuracy as a holy relic, just as the artist left it, like the bedroom of a deceased child. The preservation makes the studio mystical, displaced from its context, it appears as an apparition of 80's london in its ghostly Hirst-Like vitrine.

In fact we reach the point, when we see the paintings finally, that they seem so easy. This limb from Michaelangelo, this one from Muybridge and this blurred face from a personal snapshot. The look of paintings has never felt more, well, assembled. All of a sudden, the recurring compositions feel more like laziness, as if the painter has found an easy armature onto which he can easily assemble his collage of influence. Even the bravura painting, which had been what I admired most about Bacon, seems easier due to predetermination, not to mention, paling next to the example set by Titian in the previous room.

Bacon's professed appreciation of a young, up-and-coming Hirst before his passing seems more obvious now. Like Hirst, Bacon is more about Punchlines maybe. His paintings seem more illustrative and conceptual than painterly and exploratory. Maybe it is in this light that we should see them. In truth, his appropriation of all this stuff seems a lot less icky in the context of appropriation art such as Sherrie Levine or Glenn Ligon, its just that I find it hard to come to Bacon as a queer artist. For although he operated outside of artworld orthodoxy for most of his career, Bacon never feels like an outsider now. Anyway, if anyone actually reads this blog at least yet, this is one where I'd love some comment box action.

FERGUS FEEHILY @ DOUGLAS HYDE

If there was a driving force behind my recent gallery trip this was it. I first came across Fergus Feehily when he gave a workshop at my art school. It was only with retrospect that I realised how lucky I was to have been there for it as he has since become one of my most admired artists and definitely a major touchstone for the work I have since done. Also Douglas Hyde Gallery has been unbelievable over the last year or so, and while I'm gutted I missed their recent Raoul De Keyser (a major painter in my estimation) show of watercolours, recent enough exhibitions by Karin Mamma Andersson and Miroslav Tichy have been impressively curated and just, really nice to look at.

So its really difficult to get outside of my own perspective on this guy who since I've obsessed over his work, ripped it off and pretty much forced everyone who'll sit still for long enough to look at jpegs of his stuff on my laptop and, as if the fates had organised it, sat at the bottom of the stairs were a bunch of art students with their tutor, seemingly to remind me of why other ppl might not like them. The major theme among the naysayers that I gathered from my not-so-subtle eavesdropping was that the work on show "just didn't really seem like much."

I mean, Douglas Hyde is a big space, with hugely high ceilings an just masses of walls. And Feehily's work is, well, small. Assembled from scraps of wood, assorted paper, fabric, photographs and delicate, tentative passages of painting, it bears a lot of the hallmarks of what Raphael Rubinstein terms "Provisional Painting" in the much talked about recent Art in America feature. And yet the paradox of Feehily's work is that these works, while handmade, sparse and assembled with all their seams showing, are also sumptuous, multi-faceted and jewel-like.

Its pretty hard to articulate on a verbal level the way the tiny jokes, idiosyncratic details and sly formal playfulness all add up to something more and how beautifully the large white walls of Douglas Hyde are utilised so that these events are allowed to register despite their modesty. There's one painting just inside the door, where the frame is cut, presumably assembling two cheap secondhand frames, so that one edge is twice as thick as the other two. It takes a second to register but when it does, it registers as a kind of inward smile. Another painting exploits an extraordinary resonance of colour between of casually daubed pink paint on baby pink card.

Like I said, its pretty hard to verbalise precisely, but these paintings set off a reaction in me like Dougal opening the advent calender in Father Ted, it might not even matter what new detail is unveiled, but it sets off a kind of giddy impulse when a flash of pink from the side of a canvas re-energises the whole painting. They definitely feel like the work of someone who takes a kind of excessive joy in the nuts and bolts of painting. Each painting feels like a series of parcels to be opened, each detail unveils itself in such a way that that comparison just feels really right to me.

And on top of that there's the catalogue. Douglas Hyde always produce high end fetish object catalogues for their exhibitions and Feehily is the author of a number of artists's books. Sure I couldn't afford to eat lunch after buying this, but it kept me smiling all the way home on the bus, and hopefully it will be enough to stave off making a return visit before this exhibition ends in a weeks time. Yeah, that's how much time you have left to see this.

Whatup!

okay so i'm worried that this blog is coming across as me thinking i'm uh "reviewing" these shows. I mean yeah opinion comes into it, but really i'm just trying to structure my thoughts around how things i'm seeing is working and also giving some impetus to being more active in *thinking* about the art i'm looking at, and i suppose engaging in a more holistic way with things i see in general.

I've just got back from a trip to dublin where I visited 10 galleries including IMMA, the RHA , Hugh Lane and Douglas Hyde and so i reckon I saw at least fifteen exhibitions in the space of about five hours! Without taking notes. And caught cold wandering around Dublin in the cold I think! So over the next couple of days hopefully there will be a couple of posts about the shows that i thought were particularly great, with a special shout out to Fergus Feehily who was the main reason I had to get up to Dublin as soon as I had two days off work together and whose show at Douglas Hyde not only did not disappoint but far outstripped my own inflated expectations.

Oh and there is the Tulca festival which is on in Galway over the next few days in Galway which I have yet to see beyond the opening show (which i attended immediately after stepping off the bus from my Dublin trip so, you know, was a little burnt out by then)

tulca 2009

don't forget to go to the tulca 2009 opening tomorrow, if you can find it

on now etc.

Fergus Feehily is now on at Douglas Hyde, I am a huge fan and this should be pretty awesome, show is called Pavillion.

Kathy Predergast is currently showing at the Kerlin Gallery, show is called The Grey before Dawn.

Niamh O'Malley is on at the Green on Red showing a new video piece.

Bridget Flannery is showing at the Cross Gallery and it looks pretty worth checking out.

Paul Nugent at Kevin Kavanagh

Don't really understand what the exhibition happening at Pallas Projects is but it looks intriguing

Black Mariah is still showing my old tutor Mark O'Kelly

Also, I am graduating in a couple days so i'll have the skinny on this Noughties but Nice expo in the limerick city gallery.

RUTH LE GEAR @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

Ruth LeGear left a strong impression last year with her contribution to the Hou Hanru-curated EV+A in 2008. Her piece, a mixed media installation entitled Teardrops in Wonderscape, invited the viewer to lie down underneath a shimmering cluster of vials filled with tears suspended in the little containers by nothing but air pressure. There was a delicacy and inventiveness with materials and an elegant sense of audience interaction even if it did seem a little, well, cute.

As such it provides a perfect introduction to LeGears first solo exhibition mapping out all the possibilites for triumph and pitfalls that the artist has so far created for herself. In fact, it is in her handling of her own fey sensibility that the artist achieves both the most intriguing and cloying moments of this show. The work which comprises the show originates in a residency the artist undertook in iceland, and indeed the world capital of cuteness exert an overwhelming influence (I can imagine half of this stuff appearing in a Bjork inlay booklet)

The successful moments include a video installation complete with huge beanbags of dripping water. It's kind of ridiculous in a meditation-room kind of way and signals a sharper sense of humour than might be obvious in her overly cute photographs of plastic polar bears. The problem for me is maybe a discriminatory one, its just that I don't really get all this super-cute posturing.

PETER O'KENNEDY @ G126

Gah, two things i've been meaning to do for quite some time, the first one is update my blog, the second to write about G126 who are basically burning the torch for forward-looking and innovative exhibitions in Galway. Over the summer they opened a new premises in the city centre and quietly hosted a season of inventive and quirky shows by international artists. Still, this is a good month in which to comment their good work because current exhibition by Irish born artist Peter O'Kennedy showcases the venue's commitment to ambitious exhibitions by emerging artists.

The exhibition entitled Skip Roll Bump scratch is dominated by two large sculptures assembled from piping, and bits of machinery and the ambience of several sound pieces. One of those sound pieces, hissing radio transmissions, emerges from a large gramaphone speaker connected to a complicated web of piping, a stark black three dimensional drawing which dominates the centre of the small room. It feels imposing yet calmly self contained. The actual source of the sound itself is mysterious, as though the web of pipes were just a small piece of a vast constellation of interconnecting conduits.

The other piece which dominates the show, smothered by a large sheet of polythene is another large sculpture, this time seemingly assembled from parts of electronic machinery, and resembling the front of a lorry, albeit obscured by the aforementioned plastic. There is something anthropomorphically cruel about the cable ties that affix the plastic to the hulking structure which lends the room a troubling air of displaced menace.

The prints on the wall, largely photographic prints on aluminium, flesh out the artist's concerns, and kind of renegotiation of Futurism that takes on a dry immediacy as though washing off the romance of 70 or so odd years of supermensche boners and Throbbing Gristle post apocalyphta. The work seems almost fetishistically drawn to the boringness off the subject, casting aside all the sinister machinations of the glory of machinery and arriving at a language that is both immediate and casual. Pretty cool.

PAUL DORAN @ GREEN ON RED

Paul Doran is most famous for a series of work that took a love of impasto effects to the level of extreme sport, burying the canvas in a rich heap of brashly swept oil-paint. His new work by comparison feels incredibly sedate at first. Reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin, Dorans fractured little abstractions recall landscape painting in their humid greens and beizes, in almost all of the pieces on show here, the surface is animated by stuttering dark marks which in most cases form a kind of frame around the central action, consisting mainly of interlocking triangles. The muddied colours open up over time as the product of garish synthetic colours which survive in tiny flashes of mottled magenta, emerald and lemon at the edge of brushstrokes. Overall a subtle and clever show but not that exciting at the same time.



Paul Doran - Untitled

BREDA LYNCH @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

The video was kinda cool, I thought it was Lydia Lunch, rolling all over convention in some LES pit. It wasn't, it was Siouxsie Sioux, probably on TOTP.

I dunno, maybe its my ambivalence about Goth Girls in general, but I thought this show stank. Whether its Lynch's overly mannered drawing style, or the general portentous mopiness it all felt, facile? Gauche?

There is one highlight, a big lilac wall with "I ♥ Siouxsie" emblazoned across the top, its kinda cool, like what a teenage girl would do if she was given a wall in a gallery. Unfortunately Lynch doesn't take anymore cues from teenage girl's decorating schemes and the rest of the exhibtion feels too neat, the tasteful emptiness of the walls echoing the vacancy of the stuff that actually interrupted the yawning space. Sticking some popstar's face on a cat coulda been cute if the drawings themselves didn't command such a huge amount of gallery real estate. Also there are some pictures of Goth Girls, its probably about identity being performed or something, whatevs.

TERRY WINTERS @ IMMA

Signal to Noise is the name IMMA's curators have chosen for their recent retrospective of the painters last ten years. Held in the same wing of the museum that has over the last few years hosted large retrospectives for Juan Úsle and Howard Hodgkin and, like them, Winters has a canny knack for sublimating imagery into his large, dense compositions. According to the press release: "The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting." The exhibition barely makes a strong case for its premise, as shapes, figures, motifs and patterns are reintroduced remodelled, rearticulated and eventually dismantled through the painters brash and probing brushwork.

Not that it starts that promisingly, the first paintings we see are of more modest size and their tentative games with alternating narration of positive and negative space, seems like a big commotion over not much. The ideas of space articulated just aren't interesting enough to sustain the bombastic streaks of paint that criss-cross the canvases.

But then something changes, we move into the smaller rooms, where monochrome prints display a nice feel for placement, a certain crude brashness which is effective in ways it doesn't seem to be in paint. the rough scribble that he uses in place of hatching has a childlike charm and a crooked violence. The sheer number of them on the wall forces the curators point about information systems in overload but its obviousness is effective in a way that echos the prints themselves.



Terry Winters - In Blue

Suddenly the large canvases reappear, but this time, in such wild colour that they seem garish and overwhelming even without being rammed together from floor to ceiling. Mainly composed of large floating grids of rose-like configurations of space and spirograph designs. In the larger pieces the variations of the rose patterns bursts into three dimensions as they push and pull against each other and the picture plane, swirling around each other.

MARK SWORDS @ KEVIN KAVANAGH

Mark Swords latest show at Kevin Kavanagh, according to the blurb: "displays an increasingly intuitive engagement with various approaches to painting and art making." What emerges at the show, rather than a ludic free-wheeling playfulness, rather a wondrous enchantment with a sort of playful dissection. Motifs from manky bits of carpet and fabric are carefully dissected and rearticulated through paint, collage, embroidery etc. A rich awkardness pervades the show, which feels like the perspiration of a painter realising in front of you how tricky the project he has set for himself as he teases out the pictorial strands that comprise the various paintings on show (his literate yet neurotic style also provides a brilliant foil for the few flashes of wanton bravura!)



Mark Swords - Carpet

The first painting that welcomes you obliquely is Carpet, which like all the other pieces on show is of modest size. Riffing on tension between the pattern of a patch of carpet and a Heilmann-esque zig-zagging design, Swords interrelates each element of the painting in such a brittle agitated way, the painting teeters on the brink of resolution and as such provides an excellent point of entry for a show that creates more itches than it scratches.

sexual chemistry btw

taste

some half-work

(it hasn't had something else done to it yet)

studio activity

Well, things are happening in the studio and here are some photos to prove it.

both grandmothers houses

decoration/religious/ ignored

domesticity/religiosity

mary heilmann/colour/composition
blinky palermo/material ritual object (ed ruscha trace (dave hickey))
fgtorres minimalism, personal, taste (decoration)

russian icons (domesticity) islamic tiles
repetition/ medium