Eigse Carlow Arts Festival usually manages to come up with one or two good surprises in its visual arts programme - June Redfern, David Tress and Sean Henry come to mind - and this year is no exception. The surprises, both very welcome, are painters Shani Rhys James and Xiao-Fan Ru. Their names, surely, indicate their nationality: Welsh and Chinese. But not quite. Chinese, yes, but based in Paris since 1983. Welsh, not exactly. Shani Rys James was born and grew up in Australia but returned to Wales, her ancestral home, and lives there.
Her imagination is essentially Gothic. The paintings, mostly based on herself and her immediate family circle and circumstances, have a stark, raw presence. She uses few colours. Alarming gushes of bright red sit against bold black-and-white contrasts. Her backgrounds are plain and usually dark. The pigment is roughly brushed or trowelled on in jagged heaps. The atmosphere is charged and intense.
Her invariably wide-eyed subjects turn towards us as if we have interrupted them in the midst of their own private dramas, usually involving moments of familial tension or reflection. They are like embodiments of Sartre's glum motto: "Life is anxiety". Yet the images never seem parodic or untrue, and are actually quite powerful, even those on the now well-tried theme of the young girl forsaking childhood. Of these, the very straightforward Red Chair, is brilliant.
Xiao-Fan Ru's 100 Flowers is a composite grid of, as you might expect, 100 flower paintings. That is, the objects resemble flowers but they are flights of fancy, whimsical elaborations of natural engineering. The morphology of flowering plants is vast and varied to a bewildering degree. These botanical speculations, often with an anthropomorphic twist, seem to say: "Why not something like this as well?" They are agreeable and very well made, with a sure sense of colour and texture, decoratively effective but not wildly exciting.
Flowers also feature in Michael Canning's new work: 14 paintings of tulips. They take as their starting point 17th-century Dutch botanical portraits made against a background of tulipomania, when single, rare tulip bulbs were changing hands for amounts that in today's money would fill many a brown paper envelope or plastic bag.
Canning treats them in a characteristically subdued, elegiac vein, distancing them in coats of wax as though preserving them, in a way that brings to mind the Vanitas still life, subtly prompting us to remember the shortness of life and the fickleness of fate. Perhaps he has in mind the booming Celtic Tiger economy.
The tulips make up a small solo show. Designed as a succession of such shows, of varying sizes, Eigse gives visitors a chance to get a good sense of what an artist is doing. The drawback is that the quality of the available exhibition spaces varies hugely and none is actually ideal. Harsh stage lighting means that everything gets plenty of light, but in a rough and ready way.
The centrepiece show features William Crozier. His bold, authoritative works are well laid out in a big, first-floor room. Crozier is an adept pictorial organiser: give him a blank surface, any size from a postage stamp to a wall, and he'll sort it out. That is, with the use of line, colour, pattern he'll bring it to life and engage your eye in a vigorous ocular work-out. With such skills, he'd surely make a good garden designer.
Night Garden, with its robust linear scaffolding and its brilliant colours, notably a wedge of startling yellow that cuts in an angle, is like stained glass. He is good at capturing the luminescent quality of night light and he explores its strange, other-worldly quality in several pieces. Another recurrent preoccupation is spring, in pieces like Spring Cutting, a terrific little painting, that bristles with the forms of pruned plants sprouting new growth all over. Some of his headland studies are also particularly good, including the big Hay on Headland with its blocky, windblown forms. Everything is transformed in its translation to two-dimensional pattern, but Crozier clearly does a lot of looking.
Downstairs, Bridget Flannery and Simon English get a room each to themselves. The sea, memory and time are the ideas that come up repeatedly in her meditative, considered work, work that, without the hints offered by her titles, could be taken as abstract. She is good at achieving solidly made, texturally rich expanses and then lifting them with an apparently insignificant felicitous touch, as in A Burnished Sea, where a little curved line ignites the composition. North Sea Strand sees her approach become a little too slick and formulaic, but on the whole her instinct is very sound, particularly when it comes to keeping things simple.
Time is also relevant to English's landscapes. For the most part they specify a time of day, usually a quiet time: evening, dusk, early morning. They offer us horizontal bands of generally flat terrain punctuated only by power lines, road markings or the hint of a cloud formation. They evoke a certain anaesthetised state of travel by car, bus or perhaps train, with an anonymous landscape, simplified by speed, rushing past outside.
It is a very restrictive schema, and there is something slightly dispiriting about it as a view of the world, but it is also true of the way we now see landscape, and English paints beautifully. There is beauty, as well, in his images of the landscape conveyed in this way.
Edward Kennedy's pictures suffer from their location in what is essentially a hallway (and they are not unique in this). Don't let that deter you from enjoying them. Each one demands a mental readjustment. Doesn't everything, you may say. The difference is that each of his paintings is a little world in itself.
When I originally saw his work in the Paul Kane Gallery, Howard Hodgkin came to mind as an influence, and there seemed to be too much work. Certainly it looks good here, with fewer pieces, each zeroing in on its subject with a strange intensity. The Beech Tree Memorial has a nice, off-hand quality to paintwork that recalls Mark Joyce. Gallarus, with its cotton-wool, white-on-green "frame" around its dark, burnt red centre, is more overtly attractive. These are paintings that would look at their best individually, and against non-white backgrounds.
Photographer Con Kelleher says upfront that he is inspired by the work of painters, not photographers, which is a reversal of the usual traffic. His work is painterly, and graphic. Several pieces really do look like ink drawings until you notice some telltale tonal variations. Does he mean he would like the kind of direct, tactile control a painter can exercise on a surface?
In any case, working very much within the confines of photography per se, he has come up with some outstanding images, including the eloquent Flow III, which is about the flow of time.
It's unfair but necessary to mention only briefly other strong exhibitors, including Clare Langan, whose 40 Below, an evocation of a post apocalyptic world, saw her shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Artists' Award.
Carmel Benson shows very attractive "patchwork" grid paintings, perhaps inspired by and evocative of the patterns of Mediterranean villages, with terrific use of colour and light. Adrienne Doolings's figurative work is bold, vital and ambitious. Carlow painter Brian Garvey's big, calm compositions take a different but effective figurative tack.
Also striking are Julie Robinson's miniature worlds, John Albert Duignan's Brook, pieces by Patricia Burns, Claire Halpin, Jo Scanlon, Adam Bohanna, Alan Crosby, William Grace, Dorothy Smith, T.J. Byrne's half-peeled orange, and Rory Mulvey's atmospheric jazz photographs.
On the main approach to the town centre from Dublin, there is a handsome new Sheehy Motors car showroom to your right. Behind its glass facade rows of beautiful and expensive technological artefacts are drawn up. Building and cars together make up an extraordinary installation, one that is quite telling of contemporary Ireland.
But juxtaposed with the sleek machines, Michael Mulcahy's paintings (in a show organised by Waterford's Dyehouse Gallery), with their naked figures and burgeoning plant forms, rendered with urgent, graphic directness, suggest something ancient and magical, a world of instinct and ritual that, perhaps against the odds, fits comfortably with the new.
The forewords to the festival programme and the exhibition catalogue strike different notes: the former is slightly ominous, and the latter rather more rousingly optimistic. In the latter Caoimhin O Neill of Carlow College reports that progress is being made towards the provision of a visual arts space for the town and the region.
The programme points out that the festival, like most, depends on the voluntary labour of an enthusiastic hard core, and on the goodwill of many. But the bottom line is that it needs more support, including a full-time administrator. Eigse has by now conclusively demonstrated the case for both administrator and venue.
Eigse 2000 runs until Sunday. Booking: 0503-40491
