Visual Arts/Reviewed: Some things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees. I want money! That's what I want, Daniel de Chenu, Bank of Ireland Baggot Street until Nov 17 Tracings, Pat Harris, Taylor Galleries until Nov 18 01-6766055 Seven Dogs, Nicky Hooper, Ashford Gallery until Nov 23 01-6617286 Peter Collis, paintings, Solomon Gallery until Nov 20 01-6794237
The Bank of Ireland clearly has a sense of humour. Its headquarters in Baggot Street is currently playing host to Daniel de Chenu's installation, Some things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees. I want money! That's what I want. You may recognise the lyrics, taken from a song first recorded, de Chenu points out, by Barrett Strong in 1959. The multifaceted installation addresses contemporary Ireland's emphasis on conspicuous consumption and monetary value.
Watched by a number of attentive, child-like dolls, an array of 10 LCD monitors display a variety of material: money being literally made, a slide show of French Impressionist paintings, views of elaborate hats worn by women at the races, as well as clips from an animated film, Leprechauns' Gold, and from Indecent Proposal (in which a billionaire offers a newly married woman a million dollars to sleep with him). The dolls are sitting on blocks of shredded currency, which is also used, together with gold leaf, in a series of emblematic images designed in the manner of children's illustrations: Television, Truck, House, Crane, Christmas Tree.
Generally when a work of art makes it into the mainstream news it is because it has been stolen or has fetched some vast price at auction. There are various theories as to why fantastic price-tags are attached to certain art works, from the simple mechanics of supply and demand to questions of cultural prestige. In the popular imagination, art becomes associated with huge sums in an almost magical way, to the exclusion of any other consideration.
De Chenu's work notes this fact, and aims to have us look beyond it. His installation implies that children are indoctrinated from early on with a passive, consumerist ethic and a reverence for wealth. Money, in Marx's famous formulation, is frozen desire, and money itself is the main subject of the imagery we trace from screen to screen. One leprechaun's obsession with gold is his undoing. The animated film features a strange ritual. Each year the leprechauns wash their gold. This seems to be less a reference to laundered money than an expression of the idea that you should treat money with responsibility and respect. The point is presumably to have wealth without it having you. De Chenu has made a thoughtful, provocative, un-preachy installation that is ideally situated.
PAT HARRIS'S TRACINGS at the Taylor Gallery are traces, paintings that subject things to such a slow, meditative scrutiny that their material presence becomes dematerialised, transparent, and they persist only in terms of their residues, their essential traces. His is an art of loss, then, and of an awareness of the tenuousness of our hold on the world. Over the years he has evoked landscapes dense with histories of which there is hardly a visible sign. They have been scoured and worn and might seem to tell us nothing. Yet it is the absences within them, their sense of brooding melancholy, that engages Harris.
It makes sense that he has been drawn to the genre of still life, traditionally associated with transience and mortality. The flowers, fruits and gourds that he chooses to paint are framed by and threaten to disappear into background voids, expanses that are empty yet, like the landscapes, are charged with the energy of memory, or longing.
Harris finds another memento mori in the form of a watch, and arguably overbalances the image's delicate point by underlining it with an unusually specific title My Father's Watch. While a certain sadness is integral to the paintings, it is important to emphasise that there is an air of affirmation about them as well.
It is there in the luminosity that suffuses them, in their careful attentiveness to what is easily overlooked, the fact that they bear witness. The catalogue includes an essay by Peter Fallon that provides a fine insight into Harris's work, pointing out, among other things, the importance of Charles Brady in its development. The influence of Brady, a supremely tactful and understated painter, remains evident in this show.
NICKEY HOOPER'S SEVEN DOGS at the Ashford Gallery centres on an intriguing idea and is a beautifully installed show. Each work depicts an individual dog (or in one case a trio of dogs). They are all strays, lost dogs, a subject primed for pathos, which she completely sidesteps without betraying the emotions attached to ideas of abandonment and separation. Each painting is titled with a word denoting qualities imputed to dogs: Tenacity and Constancy for example. The dogs themselves are never pathetic or unwell. They look fine, engrossed in their own dog concerns.
In ways the paintings recall Dermot Seymour's unsentimental accounts of animals, including dogs. Hooper incorporates them in boldly designed schemes, using patterned wallpaper and commercial enamel paint as grounds. By contrast with the hard-edged, graphic style of the surrounds, the bodies of the animals are in most cases hesitantly rendered in thinly brushed coats of oil paint, as if to emphasise their organic vulnerability.
Hooper herself is at her most uncertain in these passages of paint work. She seems more comfortable with the design elements of the compositions.
PETER COLLIS'S SHOW at the Solomon Gallery is a substantial one. It could seem crowded, but it doesn't, perhaps because of the painter's supremely workmanlike air.
Each picture just gets on with what it is supposed to do; each occupies its own space and doesn't impinge on its neighbours. Collis's long-term preoccupations have been landscape and still life, the former often related to a particular slice of territory around Killiney Bay and inland of it, a mountainous topography with a distinctive character.
His major artistic influence, Cezanne, has been consistent as well, evident in both the recurrent landmarks and the simple arrangements of fruit and vessels, all treated with an eye to geometrical structure. Yet Collis has worked through Cezanne, so to speak, to his own style. This exhibition sees him in ambitious form, tackling some large landscape compositions with great confidence and verve. He is particularly good on the foreground to middle distance areas. In picture after picture these feature some terrific passages of painting conjured from unpromising material: nondescript stretches of heather and rock, for example.
