A return to absorbed abstraction

Painter Ger Sweeney is delighted to be back after a three-year break - and it shows, writes Ian Kilroy

Painter Ger Sweeney speaks of his work with confidence and assurance. Having taken a few years out from painting, he seems to be returning now with new faith in and fascination with the possibilities of his art and has a new exhibition opening in Galway.

"I was jaded, a bit burned out really," he says, in a soft Co Mayo accent. "As a painter it was time to take a break and stand back. So around 1995 I started to think about leaving Ireland, about doing some travel."

Sweeney, who had started as a photo-realist fascinated with urban landscapes, evolved early into an abstract expressionist. A series of solo exhibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminated in a 1993 solo show at the Guinness Hop Store - 54 paintings hailed as "an impressively vast body of work", with "a surety of compositional control". His name was on the ascendant but his engagement with his work had exhausted him - particularly his intensive preparations for his Hop Store show. Three years away from painting followed, spent largely working in interior design in Boston, and in travels to India, Brazil, and various parts of South America.

"Sometimes travel can excite your eye," he says. "It made me want to take up the brush again." In 1999, he began painting in Boston, exhibiting around the city. Soon he was back in Ireland with new purpose. Now he would focus solely on his art, moving away from the theatre design work that had made him something of a name in that field, with lauded designs for Galway-based companies such as Druid and Macnas. Sweeney, however, credits that period of theatre work with influencing his style for a time.

"The theatre work fed into the painting in that I was making quite dramatic paintings at the time," adding that he has moved somewhat away from that now, making work with greater consideration, more concerned with process and ambiguity.

"In my new work, I wanted to deal more with surface, rather than the references outside that surface, and formal devices, as opposed to wild expressionism."

While Sweeney's painting, although basically abstract, has always had suggestions of the figurative or of landscape, in the new work there is evidence of a greater obsession with the paint itself. "I'm not trying to illustrate, I'm trying to make the canvas itself what you appreciate". In other words, he is "trying to bring the painting to the surface of the work, where it's more about painting".

His renewal as a painter has also involved a change in his palette. A lot more reds, ochres and whites are in evidence, it is more optimistic and open-ended work than before, or "less didactic", as he likes to term it. Even his pace has changed, paintings evolving at a slower rate, being painted over and started again, gradually building up, layer upon layer of history. "I used to be a much faster painter. More recently I spend a lot more time looking; looking for balance."

With that slower pace has come an openness to the role that chance plays in the painting process, "the volcanic eruptions, high-energy explosions and controlled car crashes" suggested by earlier work have given way to calmer interest in kinetic effects that gestate rather than explode. But still, those early influences remain in evidence.

"I was always intrigued by the work of Sean Scully, who was my external examiner at college. Then there was Phelim Egan, my tutor in Dublin. Those are influences to some degree. My work has been very much based on abstract expressionism, influences like Franz Klein and all that American abstract expressionistic stuff . . . then, of course, there's Rothko, de Kooning and Richter."

Despite that absorption with abstraction, figurative elements do remain in Sweeney's work, if deeply buried. That figurative residue is evident in his use of titles, where other pure abstractionists have settled, instead, on numbering. "Titles are playful for me," he says. "Titles can be overly descriptive and dictate the way you look at things. But, for me, I'd rather put names on them than numbers. Often, titles have to do with my memories of different places . . like Riosa is a play on Rio, in South America . . but the titles are playful and don't dictate a viewing."

What the titles do point to is that tension in Sweeney's essentially abstract works between the freedom of expression, on the one hand, and the desire for control, on the other, the tension between the figurative and the abstract, and between the illustrative elements and the pure play of paint.

Technically, that paint remains largely acrylics, Sweeney having become allergic to the thinners needed in employing oil paints some 15 years ago. "It was terrible," he says, "all those skin rashes". That allergy he credits with triggering a transformation in his painting, a change from his early photo-realism to abstract expressionism, from oils to acrylics. But he is beginning to use water-based oils in this new work, as well as making greater use of sand for added texture in the paint.

This latest exhibition, his biggest since his 1993 Hop Store show, signals a greater maturity and confidence in Sweeney as a painter. It is something of a homecoming for one of our best western artists, who has exhibited from San Francisco to the European Parliament in Brussels, as part of Imaginaire Irlandais and in various group shows from London to New York.

"I'm really excited about this show," says Sweeney. "It's the biggest thing I've done in years. I'm fascinated by the possibilities of painting again.

"It's great to be back and working."

Cusp, painting by Ger Sweeney, is at the Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, Galway, until December 21st