A working space to try out ideas and possibilities

The Space Between, Paintings by David Crone. Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Sq West, Dublin 1. Until November 27

Suppose for a moment we can divide paintings into two categories. One consists of representations of scenes or things. In other words, we can evaluate such works on how truthfully and accurately we think the artist has captured how something looks or feels. The other category doesn’t have much to do with representations of things in that sense, though it may incorporate them. It demands that you make a mental leap into another way of looking at a painting, and it’s a leap that many people are not prepared to make, they have difficulty with it. It can prompt them, for example, to dismiss “abstract” art because it doesn’t look like anything or anyone could do it.

Think of the second category in this way: the painting isn’t a picture of something else, it’s an attempt to create an imaginative space, a space to try out ideas and possibilities. In a series of 1984 lectures subsequently published in book form, American painter Frank Stella came up with the term “working space” to describe what this kind of painter – including himself – was trying to do.

As he sees it, Caravaggio made a breakthrough into this way of painting, making busy, dramatically charged compositions in close, contained pictorial spaces. In doing so, Stella says, he opened up a world of possibility for Baroque artists. Abstract painters in the 20th century had done something similar, he argued, and in fact it was in its capacity to generate novel kinds of working space that painting periodically managed to renew and reinvent itself.

Among Irish painters who make work that falls into the second category, as outlined by Stella, David Crone is certainly one of the best. His current show at Hillsboro Fine Art, The Space Between, is well titled. It also demonstrates that he is still restless, still exploring, and as exacting in his self-criticism as ever. The garden, woodlands and lakes he explores in this recent work are familiar territory, but he never takes anything for granted.

Crone was born in Belfast in 1937. When he went to Belfast College of Art he actually studied sculpture, not painting. The college was fairly conservative, but the sculpture department was particularly so, and Crone began to wonder about his commitment to sculpture, turning increasingly to painting and drawing. He was also friendly with two painters, Tom Carr and Romeo Toogood, who influenced him.

After college he taught at secondary level. He was also quietly pursuing his own painting, though, and began to exhibit regularly throughout the 1960s. He painted landscapes but rather than composing conventional views, as SB Kennedy put it, he looked intently at “details of the scene”, depicting them as if picked out by the eye against a blur of movement, as though from the window of a passing train.

Crone isn’t a political artist in the sense of being politically engaged or partisan, but as the 1970s and the Troubles wore on, he began to produce works that are effectively layered, fragmentary, often quite uneasy views of Belfast city. There’s an air of both watchfulness and of being watched in many of these paintings, with their overlapping complexes of pavements, windows, mirrors and alleyways. Crone has been consistently attentive to the different kinds of commingled spaces in which we live and work, and the distinctively different characters they possess.

“When I stand in front of a David Crone,” the poet Michael Longley wrote, “I think of windows and mirrors, an interplay of reflections that brings the outdoors inside and, beyond the glass, the indoors outdoors.” You never know quite where you are, he notes, in relation to the spaces opened up within the painting.

"Most motifs in David Crone's paintings," the academic Slavka Sverakova says, "lead a double life." When she cited Kafka's The Castleas a useful point of reference for figuring out his work, he himself remarked to her that Italo Calvino's writings might provide some insight.

After teaching for many years at the Belfast College of Art, where he was a highly regarded, influential presence, Crone moved to the country, in the mid-1990s. By then he was so firmly identified as an urban painter the move seemed incongruous. Yet the landscape, whether urban or rural, had always been his subject, and he proceeded to explore the new world surrounding him with the same incisive curiosity that he brought to bear on city life.

He is a thoughtful, judicious painter with a beautiful touch and a finely tuned colour sense that is closely based on natural observation. His command of a palette of muted greens, greys, blues and russets is exceptional. Although his method of applying pigment could be described as gestural, the surfaces of his paintings, which have affinities with those of Bonnard and Vuillard, are slow and rhythmic rather than hurried or brusque.

In this show, Green Spaceis a radiant box of illuminated space within a woodland, Crowded Spaceis a dense inventory of stems and vegetation, Treesoffers a morphology of types and Morning Lightis a slow-motion account of light working its way through and behind a variety of linked spaces and objects. Mostly, though, these are paintings that you should see for yourself, and avoid, if possible, asking what they are pictures of. As Crone himself says: "The best paintings come about when you are not aware of where you are, or how you feel."