Visual Art Aidan DunneReviewed Recent Paintings: From the Midlands, Martin Gale, Taylor Galleries until Oct 28, 01-6766055; 10° West, Veronica Bolay, Hallward Gallery until Oct 26, 01-6621482
There are few surprises in Martin Gale's Recent Paintings: From the Midlands at the Taylor Galleries. Few surprises, but a lot to relish and admire. In this substantial body of work, he revisits themes and imagery that have preoccupied him consistently for decades, and he does so with tremendous authority and conviction.
As the title suggests, his subject is that relatively neglected region of the country, the midlands. In Irish landscape painting they are regarded as "somewhere that must be passed through in order to get to the 'promised land' of the west, or the south, or the north," as he puts it. Now they are in a period of dramatic transition as motorways, bypasses and long-distance commuting redefine the nature of many provincial towns and villages.
These changes are current, yet they are part of a familiar pattern for Gale, who has continually addressed the way peripheral and rural individuals and communities live in an environment that is always in a state of transition. The rural in his work is hardly ever a stable, pastoral ideal, though elements of something like that have been evident on occasion. Instead, the country in his paintings is the site of hard agricultural graft and uneasy suburbanization, a place that is part of rather than apart from mainstream consumer culture. It also frames the day-to-day realities of individual lives, something that is particularly close to his heart, and something that he has long been adept at describing.
Here, in the most matter-of-fact way, is his Irish rural reworking of Casper David Friedrich's icon of Romanticism The Wanderer Above the Mists. Where Friedrich's wanderer cuts a dash, Gale's is thickset, wrapped in a warm overcoat, and instead of regarding the primeval Central European forest he follows a trail through a forestry plantation of conifers, its pitted wheel-tracks brimming with rainwater.
Time and again we see people confront their own isolation. Happy Birthday presents us with the potentially forlorn spectacle of a child on a trampoline in a large garden. Balloons tied to the hedge that fronts onto the road tell us that the party is about to commence or has ended. It is either of those moments, before or after, that interests Gale most.
The garden and the road are staple indicators of personal and public worlds in his paintings. As in the case of the child on the trampoline, his protagonists are always attuned to the character and demands of these distinct spaces, and they are never the cowed, typecast players of Victorian pictorial convention: they are usually thoughtful and self-contained, caught in consideration of the questions and realisation we face every day in life. Except that they function within a provincial, rural context that might be overwhelming. Often in the pictures there is a sense of a burgeoning natural world barely held in check, as though the elements and the vegetation will soon obliterate traces of transient human habitation.
In fact human dismay with and incomprehension of nature could be a significant subtext in Gale's work. There is an abiding feeling that the beauty of it all eludes us, or is subverted by us. One of the strengths of the paintings is that for all the narrative elements they employ, they don't actually tell us stories. Instead, they raise possibilities and allow us to weave our own stories into the pictorial fabric. It is in all a very consistent body of work with some beautiful individual pieces.
Veronica Bolay's show 10° West features a number of paintings inspired by Croagh Patrick, collectively titled The Reek Series, together with more general landscapes, often incorporating the sea: 10° West is west of the Reek. The famous peak itself is pictured as an archetypal holy mountain, a big conical mound. It's a simple and simply described shape, but for an artist with a vocabulary as spare and refined as Bolay, it has something of the force of a volcanic eruption. She has accustomed us to dealing with a flatter, less eventful terrain.
Typically, in her paintings, horizontal lines demarcate compositional planes: plain, field, mountainside, sand, sea, sky. The occasional diagonal accent merely serves to emphasize the horizontal trend. In a way it doesn't matter whether the area in question is earth, air or water. Each is contemplated and savoured as a space imbued with a quiet though positively crackling energy.
Energy is pretty much what it's about, given that Bolay has devoted much of her efforts to getting rid of most of the things that usually clutter up generic landscape painting. Most, if not quite all: in several works, a red barn and what might be dwellings, isolated and seen from a great distance, stand in for the human presence in otherwise deserted expanses. Mind you, there is always the sense of someone, an observer, bearing witness to these spaces and places, someone attuned to the subtle, continuous shifts in light and air.
Sometimes Bolay registers these shifts as a glow flickering magically across the surface of the picture.
These nuances of light and shade, coaxed out of layer on layer of paint, are extremely atmospheric and persuasive, but they wouldn't quite work if she didn't also manage to impart a sense of scale.
Looking at her images, we are sure of the vastness of the scenes they describe. All of this she has down to a tee. Her accounts of the Reek are looser, rougher, and presumably intentionally so, perhaps reflecting the mountain's penitential role for those who negotiate its paths, its jagged quartzite fragments, barefoot. Yet, while the physicality of the mountain is indisputable, the show's centre of gravity certainly resides in the hazy paintings of empty space.
