Why making art is a dirty business

VISUAL ART: AIDAN DUNNEreviews this week's exhibitions

Dirty Paintings and works on paper

by Norbert Schwontkowski Kerlin Gallery, Anne’s Lane, South Anne St, Dublin. Until July 17

Norbert Schwontkowski was born in Bremen in 1949. He began exhibiting in the late 1970s, though it’s really in the years since the turn of the century that the “melancholy quietism” of his distinctive pictorial voice has brought him substantial recognition. His paintings and works on paper, with their muted lyricism, their tiny, intrepid figures, human and animal, and their abstracted, almost cartoonish settings, have the air of being dreamlike fables.

Dirty is the slightly disconcerting but altogether appropriate title of his current, outstanding exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery. Not only because, as he explained it himself, dirt is a useful metaphor to apply to the creative process. A flower will grow and blossom in the dirt and, comparably, a felicitous painting might emerge from the messy, protracted process involved in making it. To make anything, in fact, entails generating a related mess: think of cookery, say, or building construction.

It’s also appropriate because Schwontkowski’s work exemplifies, and in many ways anticipated, a consciously impoverished, degraded and gritty form of realist painting. In fact, it could be termed “dirty realism” if the expression didn’t already have a definite literary meaning, as applied to the stories of Raymond Carver and other writers.

The world we see in Schwontkowski's work tends to look post-industrial and disordered, more than a little grubby and jaded. Even brave new architectural gestures are presented as being empty and hubristic in his Three Hotels in Holland.

People, when they appear, are usually solitary presences, isolated against huge, murky expanses, engaged in some task or diversion. They can come across as careworn and forlorn or even, if they seem to believe the PR, misguided. But there’s also something heroic and admirable about the way they cling to a sense of purpose and meaning in a surreal environment.

There's a down-at-heel romanticism to much of what he does, as in Hinterwaldand Coney Island in Spring.

The physical fabric of the paintings reinforces the down-at-heel impression. Schwontkowski favours shades of muddy grey. He reputedly grinds his own pigments, and besides linseed oil, mixes in metal oxides and bone glue. Plus which, he seems to do a fair amount of over- painting.

The end results of all this are often surfaces with grainy, uneven, lumpy textures. Frequently, there’s also an awkwardness and naivety to the images in the way they don’t follow the conventional rules of representation and composition.

So is Schwontkowski a sort of outsider artist? No, he isn’t at all, but he clearly sees the strategies characteristic of outsider art as legitimate approaches to making paintings. In fact, any approach is legitimate for him.

He is one of those artists who, once they think that the rules decree that you shouldn’t do something, goes right ahead and does it. There’s a series of small paintings in the show that coolly appropriates Picasso’s Cubism, for example. If there’s a description of his work that comes close to actually summing it up, though, it’s probably something like German Romanticism revisited the morning after the party.

Hot Body/Ugly Face SyndromePaintings and drawings by Sheila Rennick. NCAD Gallery, Thomas St, Dublin. Until September 4

In Sheila Rennick's painting Wedding, the bride and groom pose for the camera. He is a deranged-looking, bleary-eyed idiot in a dress suit with a lemon bow tie and a mad froth of ruffles on his shirt-front.

She’s a smirking, deluded, over-styled sap wearing a candy-floss dress and bejeweled veil. Everything about them says ostentatious vulgarity and ludicrous pomposity. The painting itself resembles a wedding cake decorated by a manically inept baker on speed. Rennick, we can presume, doesn’t take prisoners.

That’s borne out by the rest of the work in her show Hot Body/Ugly Face Syndrome.

She is not, however, just standing to one side sniggering at the rest of the world.

Self-delusion is her theme, the human capacity for self-delusion that leads us into all manner of ridiculousness, which she is happy to be on hand to point out. People, as she sees it, are blissfully unaware of their own daftness, absorbed in the fantasy of their lives.

In her world of urban mythology, magical transformations are not uncommon. Men become dogs, there’s a very catty Cat Woman and the creature that gives the show its title is one massive heap of a gorilla.

Rennick uses broad strokes but she’s minutely observant and it’s worth looking at her work in detail.

Her preening Debs, and her several accounts of nights on the town are acute and full of insight.

Be warned though, if you’re easily offended, you may find her wickedly transgressive.

Making NatureGroup show exploring nature in art Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin. Until July 10

Making Nature, curated by Gemma Tipton, is a group show that sets out to explore how we remake nature as art, but we also find that nature has often been remade in the image of culture.

Robert Volt’s landscape photographs have at their centre imposters: those extraordinary looking faux trees designed to disguise the technology of communication and surveillance. Why make artificial trees that look so artificial? Apparently we’ve grown so indifferent to checking out our environment that it doesn’t even register with most people that they are artificial.

Blaise Drummond's work examines the relationship between modernism, especially modernist architecture, and nature. The rationality and order of the grid is contrasted with the otherness and chaos of the natural. Katie Holten's Darwin's Treesees a symbol of order in a twig.

Caroline McCarthy’s floral still life, a photographed sculpture, is quietly subverted by the fact that the blossoms are fashioned from toilet tissue.

Nature performs in Jennifer Steinkamp’s hypnotic looped video of lilies as dancers.

The forest, in Anita Groener’s subtly three-dimensional images, becomes Dante’s allegorical landscape, the point in life’s journey where the pathway is lost.

Barbara Novak’s botanical studies represent science’s taxonomic project.

Nadin Maria Rufenacht’s floral still-life photographs emphasise the morte in nature morte.

Rowena Dring’s patchwork landscapes are virtuoso, slightly unsettling feats of synthesis, seeing a fundamental order in the unruliness of the landscape. It’s a modestly sized show, but big in reach and thought, and beautifully installed.