Mark Joyce: Wandering Star
Green on Red Gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
In The Emigrants, his novel from 1996, WG Sebald tells of a character who “described a gentle arc with a goose wing in the darkening air”. It’s a delightfully old-fashioned usage: “to describe” was the precise Middle English term for tracing or delineating a curve.
It is something of a shame that the word no longer carries this particular currency, as there is certainly no richer way of characterising Mark Joyce’s latest painting show than to say it is devoted to describing arcs, following their flow and mapping their interactions with the patience of a navigator or an astronomer.
In Wandering Star, over 14 works of acrylic on raw linen, Joyce uses a reduced vocabulary of arcs arranged in blocks or groupings abutting each other. From a distance the groupings give each canvas a fractured, almost collaged feel. Up close, the artist’s initial outline drawings are faintly visible, as is the raw canvas that asserts itself here and there, highlighting the bands of colour, both features emphasising the gestural control at play in the laying down of the curves.
Like much art that consists of colour lines in this manner – one might think of Bridget Riley or Tomma Abts – the control is essential. Yet the works do not have the rigidity of so much geometric or op art. Joyce’s brushwork in this regard is more akin to the kind of inquisitive calligraphic flow seen in the meandering lines of Brice Marden’s late Asian-influenced paintings.
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What is particularly absorbing about the paintings here is the manner in which the arcs and bands of colour subtly register the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of their neighbouring lines.
In Wandering Star 2 a pair of small bumps disturbing one smooth sweep of red are then carefully incorporated into the orange line that sits beside it, the two colours gently spooning into each other like a sleeping couple.
Similarly, in Cassini 7 the jagged edge of an otherwise gently curving dark blue creates a ripple that reverberates through the stripes of light blue, teal, navy and grey until it dissipates at the feet of another broad band of arcs that dominate the left-hand side of the canvas.
As references to Cassini – be that the 17th-century astronomer or the space probe – suggest, there are clear evocations of the rings of Saturn within this series of canvases. But just as strong, for this viewer at least, is the resonance between Joyce’s motifs here and those found in Neolithic rock art such as the clusters of curves and arcs etched into the kerbstones of Brú na Bóinne or the orthostats of Gavrinis, in Brittany.
Such is the potency of those ancient forms, and such is their confident, deliberate execution here, that despite this long and august lineage Joyce’s paintings display a clarity and vitality that feel compellingly fresh and new.
Wandering Star is at Green on Red, Dublin, until Friday, May 15th; on Wednesday, May 13th, at 7pm, the composer Fergal Dowling and the guitarist Shane Latimer will present a live musical event as a response to the paintings after an artist’s talk in the gallery
