Painting a veil over the past and present

VISUAL ART:PAUL NUGENT'S Remembrance Paintingsat Kevin Kavanagh is an unusual exhibition, but then Nugent is quite an unusual artist. The show has been arranged in two distinct parts: the work on view was replaced halfway through, and only two of the paintings have featured in both instalments. Furthermore, each segment concentrates on a different body of work, writes AIDAN DUNNE

The first offered glimpses into a number of religious settings and institutions, while currently a series of portraits takes centre stage.

As the title might suggest, there is an underlying rationale to this half-time switch. Memory is a central concern in the paintings, as is disappearance. So it seems appropriate that we are invited to see the second part of the show while bearing in mind the first. There is, though, a retrospective cast to all of the work to begin with. In Nugent’s paintings the present is always, to borrow a phrase from the biologist and theorist Gerald Edelman, the remembered present. It is as if perception and consciousness flourish only in the hazy light of memory.

Nugent’s first solo shows, in the latter half of the 1990s, were intriguing. At first glance, all you could see were what looked like a series of identical, monochrome abstracts, flat expanses of a single colour. Then, depending on the level of the available light, you became dimly aware that there was an image embedded in the apparently uniform surface. The image was usually a formally posed portrait of a figure in religious attire – a priest or a nun of a particular order, and in some cases, rank. The standard interpretation might be that Nugent was referring to and perhaps commenting on the notional spiritual content of abstraction.

His methodology suggested something more, and his methodology has developed rather than altered, so the details of his approach are just as relevant to his current as to his early work. Significantly, a painting is never just an image for him, but the end result of a series of protracted processes entailing value judgments at every stage. A model, usually someone known to him, would be dressed in a facsimile of the garb of a particular religious order. He would photograph them and then, from the photograph, make a detailed representational portrait painting, in black and white. When that was dry, he would apply numerous glazes until the representational image was only dimly evident – if at all – beneath a layered blanket of colour.

This programme is broadened out in Remembrance. The images are for the most part quite readable, even though they are generally veiled, often heavily, by multiple glazes of a single colour. Taken together, they map out a territory of religious dominion. Take two pertinent examples: in Ritualwe see a cleric prostrate at the feet of a hierarchical superior, who is flanked by attendants, at an altar in ceremonial attire. In Orphanagewe see ranks of beds in a high-ceilinged institutional room, overseen by a statue of Christ and other religious emblems. The scene is bathed in a cool blue light, and while it really is a beautiful painting, there is at the same time something slightly oppressive about it, the more so, perhaps, in the light of the emergent history of institutional abuse and other clerical scandals in Ireland.

Put these with other paintings in the series and we move beyond a succession of locations and individuals that happen to share a religious character, and on to a more complex account of a pervasive institutional structure. The individuals are defined within the terms of a religious iconography, clothed in it literally and imaginatively.

Nugent is adept at finding and devising sumptuously atmospheric images, but surely his work is neither devotional in any orthodox religious sense of the term, nor particularly anti-religious. He does appear to be drawn to the idea and the enactment of religion as an all-pervasive system, its architecture, its rules and rituals, its iconography, perhaps partly because it is a significant part of our cultural and historical legacy.

It might be described as an underlying dimension, as his paintings repeatedly imply, but then all societies include such a dimension.

When his paintings were shown in Finland the curator Arja Elovirta said his work “speaks about the quiet disintegration of historical knowledge, meaningful places and religious symbols into mere memories”. Put those things together into one seamless entity and you get a real sense of how the paintings come across: it’s as though we are looking at a whole language of representation fading before our eyes as the world it represented changes. But it’s also true that the present is made from and inseparable from the past, so that we live within the language and not apart from or free of it.

There’s a distinct change of emphasis in the second part of the show. Bar the two works that carry over, the paintings now on view are based on photographs of the artist’s mother, taken more than 10 years ago. Nugent improvised her costumes and poses from his memory of reproductions of paintings in art history books. Again, though in a different way, an individual is iconographically defined. She is, in fact, repeatedly reconstructed as an iconographic entity, as a Magdalene, the wife of Van Eyck, a 15th-century woman as depicted by Robert Campion, and a portrait sitter for Goya. And, of course, we must remember, as the artist’s mother: she is thus identified in several of the titles.

The wealth of material in Nugent’s quietly persuasive work, in its processes as well as in the paintings themselves, allows for many interpretative possibilities. It would surely be wrong to view it as containing any one paraphrasable message or meaning.

What it does set out to do is to explore the contemporary potential of painting, in the fullest possible sense, in the context of ideas relating to history, memory, perception and representation. It’s an ambitious programme, but one he seems more than equal to.

Remembrance Paintingsby Paul Nugent is at Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin, until Oct 31