Boyle's lore

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: Reviewed:  Group Exhibition, Boyle Arts Festival, Co Roscommon, until Friday (079-63085)

The centrepiece exhibition of Boyle Arts Festival is usually a compendious cross section of Irish art. For many years a certain level of frustration was built into the show because, although it usually featured some cracking work, there was an awful lot of it, and it was crowded into the hall of the local secondary school. By dint of hard labour and ingenuity the organisers made it look at least half-decent, but there was no way around the fact that a gymnasium dotted with zigzag, free-standing screens was not the ideal way to present paintings and sculptures.

The dearth of a dedicated exhibition venue is a problem common to many Irish towns at festival time. But, as it happened, an eminently sensible solution existed in Boyle, in the shape of King House. Many of the restored and refurbished sections of the building are given over to a historical interpretative centre, but King House also has a number of civic functions, including providing a home for Boyle's civic art collection, part of which is usually on show there. And last year, for the first time, the festival exhibition was installed there. This year it consolidates its position.

This makes a lot of sense. The spacious hallway and cleanly finished rooms are fine settings for the work. As Fergus Ahern, a long-time stalwart of both the exhibition and the civic collection, notes in his catalogue introduction: "Who knows but in the not too distant future King House will become known as a major venue for contemporary Ireland and not as a location for trying to recreate the past." It is an important point. Over the years the art collection has become a significant communal resource. Now it is not only a very good collection, built on the basis of genuine passion and instinct, it is also a living collection. This is partly because it is growing annually, but it also has to do with the nature of the show.

Although the selection, which this year runs to work by 69 artists, is idiosyncratic, in that it is usually a personal affair, it consistently brings together well-established and emerging artists. The result is a lively, ongoing dialogue, something that comes through in the collection, which is substantially drawn from the festival exhibitions. That is not to say it's a case of spirited youngsters outshining staid veterans. This year it is noticeable that some of the veterans are not at all content to rest on their laurels. Barrie Cooke, for example, shows a ravishing quartet of small New Zealand landscapes that are lush, vibrant and bold. Basil Blackshaw shows a small work with the same exploratory spirit that made his Ulster Museum show an exceptional event last year. Seán McSweeney's bogland landscapes are fashioned with his customary intensity and precision. John Shinnors continues to push the possibilities of his language of poised abstraction. Barbara Warren shows a fine, relatively large-scale Connemara landscape that is carefully and precisely structured. No complacency here.

Although the festival favours traditional media and formats, it would be rash to dismiss it as conservative. There is a bias towards work that can be termed painterly, or sculptural in the traditional sense of representational modelling, but it is a bias that arises from a considered, experienced response to the work, not from a preconceived aesthetic prejudice. There are, as well, several paintings included that are eminently contemporary in feeling and substance, such as Mark Joyce's exceptional, cool paintings on papyrus. And Paddy McCann is always a thoughtful, subtle painter of understated works.

Aidan McDermott's invented worlds have a strange, brooding atmosphere that is all their own. Also quite distinctive, Mary Theresa Keown creates complicated, composite spaces ripe with narrative implications. Makiko Nanamura makes beautifully concentrated abstracts that combine logic and emotion in their impeccable, highly polished surfaces. Nick Miller's landscapes, full of the ripe profusion of nature, strikingly reinvent a genre.

That painterly bias is reflected in all of this work, regardless of its other qualities, and also in the inclusion of pieces by Michael Canning, Felim Egan, Judy Hamilton, Cormac O'Leary, Colin Crotty, Alexey Krasnovsky, Breon O'Casey, Pam Berry, Colin Davidson, John Kingerlee and more, including some surprises, such as Keith Wilson, whose atmospheric work has a subdued lyricism.

It is, in all, an estimable show, enormously varied but built with a guiding sensibility that comes through. As the civic collection has grown it has attracted the attention and goodwill of a number of individuals and organisations. Several artists, including Seán McSweeney, have donated works, and the Haverty Trust, which gives works to public collections, has been generous. During the past year the trust has enhanced the collection with the donation of two fine paintings, by T. P. Flanagan and Barbara Warren. The civic collection, which now numbers more than 120 pieces, is an encouraging example of what can be accomplished with modest resources and exceptional commitment.