Reviewed: La Primavera: Margaret Corcoran, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until March 31st (018740064);
New Prints: Jennifer Lane, Graphic Studio Gallery until March 31st (01-6798021)
print.ie:
The Original Print Gallery until March 29th (01-6773629)
In La Primavera, her exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Margaret Corcoran delves into art history and the iconography of classical mythology to produce a series of strange, fragmentary, perplexing visual hybrids. It is as if, in her images, the wilful illogicality of 20th-century surrealism invades the meticulously cultivated, logical space instituted in European painting by the Renaissance, a pictorial space that was predominant until the ocular experiments of the Impressionists presaged a revolution in seeing.
Surrealism itself was unleashed by Freud's theory of the unconscious, and there is a specific reference to Freud here, in the form of his account of the Wolf Man. Yet Corcoran piles on ambiguities. Freud posited that the Wolf Man's dreams of wolves had their genesis in his repressed memory of having witnessed, as an infant, his parents having sex. The Wolf Man himself was adamant that he had seen no such thing. The wolves are there in Corcoran's paintings, but in a fantastic idiom, so we're not sure on which level to take them.
Still, recurrently, the construction of her images suggests the irruption of unsuspected additional worlds into apparently complete worlds, as though the point of her concentration on past masterpieces is to focus on what they leave out. This might make them a collective corollary of the work in her last solo show, which dealt with the denial or evacuation of individual female identity from art history.
In many of the current paintings, portrait images by Ingres are overlain by garlands of flowers, or otherwise combined with floral motifs. The main source for this device seems to be a strange detail in Botticelli's celebrated Primavera. In this work a formidable cast of characters, including Mercury, the Three Graces, Venus and Flora, seems to float across, rather than be grounded in, a woodland scene.
The relevant detail is on the right of Botticelli's composition, relating to Ovid's derivation of Flora, the goddess of flowers and springtime, from the Greek Chloris. When Chloris is grasped by her pursuer, Zephyr, a stream of flowers issues from her mouth and she is transformed into Flora. Botticelli depicts the moment that Zephyr lays hands on Chloris and, bizarrely, flowers spill from her mouth. Simultaneously, her subsequent persona, Flora, scatters spring flowers around her.
In some respects, the wariness of naturalism evident in Botticelli's representational method is a throwback to the Gothic, to a world of magic and mysterious forces predating the intellectual clarity of the Renaissance. Could it be that, in her use of the floral motif, Corcoran aims to equip fixed, apparently self-contained subjects with the complex emotional lives, not to mention the terra incognita of the unconscious, that attention on the world of external detail denies them? Possibly. But the overall impression is that she is not overly prescriptive in her approach, and she seems content to let us live with mystery and make what we will of her imagery.
There is a risk in situating much of the visual substance of your work in copies of paintings that have attained canonical status in Western art. Encountered in the flesh, Ingres' portraits are stunning artefacts. But without any pretence at competing with her sources, Corcoran, who clearly possesses great natural facility, manages to carry off the demanding feat of imitation with considerable elan. Most importantly, her paintings amount to more than the sum of their parts. Jennifer Lane's strikingly individual woodblock prints at the Graphic Studio Gallery draw their inspiration, the press release notes, "equally from the Irish landscape and fragments of Chinese and English poetry". This odd combination conveys something of their very specific atmosphere. The artist further allocates them to Ireland's fifth province, the province of imaginative invention. It is hard to pin down the visual quality that gives her prints an Oriental flavour, but it is there nonetheless, largely in the form of exceptionally empathic nature imagery and calm, elegant form.
Lane is particularly good at evoking the sheer physical there-ness of things. She makes memorable images of yew trees, and her Pine Branch is also particularly good. Hers is an oblique, quirky vision, but it really has something going for it.
print.ie, at the Original Print Gallery, sets out to expand the possibilities of print and is modestly successful. Curated by NCAD's head of media, Kevin Atherton, it features work by six Black Church artists. The brief they were given was to respond to developments in imaging technologies. Tracy Staunton's piece, which deals with the imprint of things, amounts to an installation in itself and, though it might be a bit lost here, it is atmospheric and looks like something she might continue to explore. Andrew Folan's dark lenticular prints draw on a notorious piece of video surveillance footage. Alison Pilkington's free-standing, coloured tubular plates emphasise the hardware of the process, as does Janine Davidson's jokey printing press. Elaine Leader makes a very good, complex, layered work and Claire Carpenter's aviary can be seen both in the gallery and at www.print.ie
