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.