DAMIEN FLOOD @ GREEN ON RED

I love the way this guy paints; it looks fun, like finger painting. but though they are built from slick syrupy skeins of oily paint, the miniature abstractions in this show Counter Earth feel weirdly restrained. Like, he's not just playing with his poo r anything, there's a definite feeling that each painting riffs around some compositional motif so that the general feeling is playful but ordered.

I like the way these paintings feel like abstractions that cohere around some pictorial chassis, like it feels less like there are references to landscapes than certain paintings take on the structures of landscape painting for one example. Its a useful way of thinking abt the historicity of painting in a way that still facilitates a kind of lightness of approach, like you can just use all these phrasings without having to necc get all referential or reverential about them.

A couple of paintings just as you enter the main gallery space seem like pretty prime examples of this. (They immediately put me in mind of Thomas Nozkowski, a painter whose work pitches itself in a register somewhere between optical and process based and who seems a likely influence esp in the acidic greens and lurid reds that both use.). Both paintings employ the same basic colour pallette, a narrow band of multicoloured lozenges stutter accross the picture plane, but while one is bare the other is fractured. both appear to be based on a row of books on a shelf, but i held off saying this because it feels like they were arrived at instead of the image being "based on" them.

4get abt that tho for a second bc thats just really a bone im tryin to pick with the universe maybe.

on that note this video of thomas nozkowski talking abt his process is pretty next level as far as painters being smart and bs free abt their studio process etc. recommended.

EIMEAR TWOMEY @ G126

supreme meta-text

in theory fucking with the frame, breaking the 4th wall, i am generally down with this kind of behaviour guys. This I was only semi-okay with though.

Eimear Twomey is a recent graduate and this was an impressive show for a young artist definitely. More literate and funnier than you would find in your average degree show at least. this chick is hella neurotic abt stories, or how we tell them or how we become trapped in them. The focal point is a little collection of playbooks. each bypasses the actual drama that the title introduces and has the characters talking abt the notion of appearing in a play that is abt themselves. Its weird, considering the rhizoming meta-textuality of everything now, that it felt kinda, i dunno novel maybe. Also, i mean its pretty funny.

There is almost no colour in this exhibition btw. its all b+w and maybe that's why it seems so stark, paranoid and bleak. Even the voices in the sound piece seem like black on white, spouting ridiculous/boring agony aunt shit. It was kindof the perfect illustration of why the show isn't quite as good as those books: not as original, or didn't give itself enough space to be original ("dear ---- " is way too constraining a cliche to be inventive within imo) and, to be honest, when she uses other ppl in her work, the quality of the acting lets her down emphasizing rather than smoothing over any awkwardness in the script (the guy in the videos looks really uncomfortable to be there). like this might be "part of the point" but it still isn't "convincing."

but man maybe im just way too bogged down in the painting game atm not 2 be able to see the wood for the trees with stuff like this, it makes me curious as to how ppl like this work in the studio all of a sudden. i mean, its pretty hardcore conceptual art, really existing outside of objects in a fairly convincing way.

more posts to follow in the next couple weeks i swear!

everything went to sleep for xmas which was okay. standard series is on a mission to be more mobile and engaged in 2k10 get ready.

by way of conciliation heres my #1 jam from last year:

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.