Creating the perfect space to fill with nothing

The paintings are sufficiently clear, while vague enough on the specifics of time and place, to be read as abstract allegories

SIMON ENGLISH’S exhibition Nothing lasts forever not only comprises an outstandingly evocative body of work, it is also superbly installed in an ideal location, the Cross Gallery in Francis St, with its elegantly retro furnishings and its sequence of distinctive spaces. Using oil paint or watercolour, English makes representational paintings that hint at fragmentary, oblique narratives. As with the gallery fittings, there is a retro quality to the images.

They are not noticeably specific about what era they might evoke, or about anything else that would pin them down, though there is an Art Deco styling to at least some of the detail. Quite a small number of subjects recur with slight variations. A propeller-engined plane waits for take off or flies through the night sky. A car makes its way through murky evening light, heading towards or away from a big, isolated house. Fluorescent light spills out from a hotel in a deserted looking town. An empty display case stands in a room. A ship is about to pull away from a pier.

The scenes are usually shrouded in darkness or the misty uncertainty of dawn or dusk, against a vast, empty space. We see no people as such but their presence is implicit. The idea of the journey is pervasive, of the home left behind or headed towards, the temporary refuge along the way. And there’s an air of moody introspection that comes with protracted travel, edged with a slight unease. English frames the exhibition as a series of “disjointed recollections”, scenes involuntarily recalled, of places “in a state of transience or decline.” Most of this is probably fairly familiar for those who have followed his work. What’s different about this show is the incorporation of snatches of text, hand-lettered or handwritten, in many of the compositions, the prominent role given to the watercolours, which are outstanding, and the overall presentation, which clusters the individual pieces and greatly heightens the sensation of being in the middle of a story. For English, the story might be described as the making of an ambiguous fictional space that we feel we can occupy, much as one occupies the imaginary space of a good novel, for example.

The paintings are sufficiently clear, while vague enough on the specifics of time and place, to be read as abstract allegories. Similarly, the novelists Kazuo Ishiguro or Paul Auster can draw us into comprehensible but abstracted worlds. At the same time, as with their work, English’s vocabulary of images and motifs can also be seen as relating to a particular set of circumstances, to actual people, actual places and their histories.

He lives in an early 19th century house in rural north Co Cork, close to Charleville. The very name of the town embodies the complex layers of history that define the region. Charleville is officially named Rath Luirc or Rathluirc, though it is rare to come across someone who knows it as such. When Roger Boyle, Lord President of Munster, rebuilt the ravaged town late in the 17th century, he signalled his loyalty to Charles II by renaming it – he had been an ardent Cromwellite. Not long after his death, the mansion he had built for himself nearby was razed by James FitzJames at the close of the Jacobite War. After independence, the town’s Irish name was restored, but it has never quite taken.

Not that far away, on the other side of the Ballyhoura Mountains, is the site of the 18th-century Bowen’s Court. Its history, in many respects the story of the Anglo-Irish experience, is recounted in Elizabeth Bowen’s book Bowen’s Court. Having spent a small part of her childhood there, she inherited the big house in 1930 on the death of her father. She continued to live and work in London, visiting Ireland as often as possible, entertaining at and eventually moving to Bowen’s Court at the beginning of the 1950s. Even as her literary dinner parties were celebrated, she struggled desperately to maintain the huge house and by the end of the decade she had no choice but to sell.

Cruelly, the woodlands were felled and the house demolished, a history erased. She had foreseen or expressed her fear of such an eventuality in her novel The Last September, set during the War of Independence. The book ends with the torching of three great houses. Conflagration, it should be said, whether in the distance or in the immediate, domestic setting, is a staple motif in English's work, which often has a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality. Long before Bowen's Court was obliterated, Bowen had written that life there was "bound up in the quality of a dream." That dreaminess is also evident in JG Farrell's novel Troubles.

Roy Foster quotes Virginia Woolf describing Bowen’s Court as “merely a great stone box,” which happens to be a remarkably apt description of the houses that we find in English’s paintings. They are often monolithic edifices standing incongruously in the landscape, with a strangely hollow feeling to them. The hollowness is echoed and amplified in his many depictions of empty vitrines.

In The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen, Foster writes of the conflicted nature of her own and, more generally, Anglo-Irish identity. Not just conflicted but neither Anglo nor Irish, rootless, displaced, destabilised, and forever at odds with aspects of both. "Bowen's characters, as she said herself, are always in transit: she felt most at home in mid-Irish Sea." Again, that is a good description of the state described by English, the uneasiness of constantly arriving or departing, of being in between, burdened with a feeling of never quite belonging.

It would be overstating the case to suggest that English’s work is about Bowen in any direct, illustrative sense, but her and her family’s experiences certainly provide a useful framework of meaning through which to view it. There is no doubt that many of his motifs and images, and the troubled, elegiac mood of his work, make sense in the context of the decline of the Ascendency and its aftermath. “Permanence,” Foster quotes Bowen as saying, long after her house was gone, “is an attribute of recalled places.”

Nothing lasts forever Paintings by Simon English. Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin. Until April 30th