Reviewed:
Around Now, Grace Weir, RHA Gallagher Gallery until October 15th (016612558);
The Mirror of the Sea, Anthony Kelly and Jay Roche, County Hall Concourse, Dun Laoghaire until September 29th(01-2054749);
Anita Shelbourne, Ashford Gallery until September 22nd (01-6617286);
Stephen Cullen, Hallward Gallery until September 28th (01-6621482)
First and foremost, Grace Weir's Around Now delivers a fantastic visual experience. Beautifully designed and installed, it is, as Noel Sheridan writes in the catalogue, "a trip". Position yourself between the two opposing video projections and you find yourself adrift in distinct but equivalent cloudscapes. As masses of cloud shuttle past, you lurch vertiginously into the gaping voids between them and catch glimpses of a pastoral landscape far below, patterned with fields.
It becomes evident that you don't know where you are, exactly, or how you are moving in relation to the fantastic mobility of this ethereal world. You cannot get your bearings.
The stages of her installation relate to the taming of our experience of time and space through the structures of classical perspective. Her cloudscapes deny us the imaginary scaffolding of Euclidean geometry which would restore us to our habitual, privileged viewpoint. While to some extent it hybridises art and science, it makes a pretty good case for itself as art.
Anthony Kelly and Jay Roche's collaborative installation The Mirror of the Sea in the Concourse of Dun Laoghaire County Hall, is a considered, tactful response to both the remarkable, soaring interior space of the concourse, and its wider setting on merit it. She is a fine instinctive.
Despite the fact that both artists are primarily painters, it is a sculptural work or, more accurately perhaps, a drawing using sculptural elements, deploying just a few, minimally amended materials, including planks of waxed pine, Perspex receptacles, water, salt, ceramic cylinders, steel cable and fittings. Even from this inventory it's clear that they are speaking a nautical language.
As arranged, the several distinct units of the installation suggest notions of tension, of forces held in precarious balance, with the possibility of disaster always imminent.
The title reference to Joseph Conrad's reminiscences of seafaring misadventures, and the evocation of Turner, plus Gericault's Raft of the Medusa provide further pointers towards the work being a metaphor for our interaction with the sea. The soaring, upward movement of the Gericault, emphasised by the billowing makeshift sail, is echoed in the way the installation leads our eyes up into the bright, airy spaces of the concourse and the sky beyond.
Anita Shelbourne's work belongs in the same general context as that of Patrick Collins, Camille Souter and Nano Reid, that is in a specifically Irish, lyrical tradition of landscape and figurative painting. If she hasn't had quite the level of attention or acclaim as any of those artists, it's not because her work doesn't merit it. She is a fine, instinctive painter with her own voice, and her Ashford Gallery show displays exemplary concentration and restraint.
Surprisingly, the best pieces are painted in acrylic on paper. She coaxes exceptionally subtle effects from acrylic, a fairly recalcitrant medium, in excellent pictures like Evening, Mountain Fields, Misty Landscape and a terrific set of small studies that display real acumen, Moving Patterns. And her evocation of the thick grey light of a Frosty Morning is brilliant.
Stephen Cullen is an unabashed colourist. While it still hits the high notes, with generous lashings of livid pigment, his recent work at the Hallward is less persuasive than that in his last show. Perhaps his reliance on pure verve and blocks of pure colour is overly calculated. When he really pushes things way beyond the point where you think he's overdoing it, as in Red Mini Dress (with its Debuffet-like figure) or Winter Solstice, something interesting starts to happen. And there is one really outstanding painting in the show, the totally uncompromising Yellow Passage.
