Landscape manoeuvres

Reviewed: Groundworks, Joe Wilson.

Reviewed - Groundworks, Joe Wilson, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, until Mar 18 (028-22090)

Sculptures or paintings? It could be argued that the constructed pieces in Joe Wilson's Groundworks are both, in that they combine three- dimensional forms with painting. But they are paintings at heart, paintings that aspire to escape the bounds of a conventional flat rectangular format. Their boundaries are decided intuitively, according to the demands of the image, and by appropriating the space that conventionally separates us, the viewers, from the work of art, they aim to unsettle habitual modes of perception.

All of the works, paintings and drawings, are landscapes, and all aspire to convey a close, vivid engagement with landscape. That is, the kind of real-time engagement that is entailed by being physically in a place, by having to calculate distances and the nature of the terrain to be negotiated, rather than the purely aesthetic calculation of deciding what kind of landscape painting we are looking at: sublime, picturesque or romanticised. When Wilson seems to offer us a picture in that sense, a glimpse of a recognisably beautiful scene, which he certainly does, he invariably compromises and undercuts it, just so we don't get the wrong idea.

There is something invigorating about his show at the West Cork Arts Centre. It's not just that you are always aware, in west Cork, of the rolling expanses of lush coastal countryside, the vastness of the ocean and the closeness of the weather, though all that is true and there is an obvious, perceptible link between the work in the gallery and this outside world. Rather, what Wilson manages to do is to manoeuvre us into his work in a manner that strikingly evokes an encounter with those outside spaces.

Even when he works within a conventional format, this is one of his aims. Years ago, in an exhilarating show of drawings devoted to an exploration of his wild, overgrown garden near Enniskerry in Co Wicklow, his impulse seemed to be not so much, as one might expect, to make sense of the garden by drawing it, to put a certain order on things. On the contrary, it was as if he wanted to lose himself in the garden. Drawing after drawing adopted an unorthodox, sometimes precarious viewpoint and made us try to find our bearings. While flirting with outright chaos, though, Wilson made clear his fidelity to the facts: the conviction of his drawing derived from his commitment to describing what was in front of him.

More recently, a sojourn on Achill, in a studio borrowed from John McHugh, produced an epic, remarkable, panoramic drawing of the east-west ridge of the island, tellingly titled Bearings. The artist wanted and wants us to orientate ourselves in relation to the landscape, but not within the bounds of pictorial convention. Taking a further step, he began to extend the flat picture surface out into the spectator's space, and to transgress the neat rectangular limits of the picture frame. With Groundworks, both these initiatives are taken much further. He has made large-scale, elaborate painted constructions to as much as half a metre in depth.

Starting from a wooden board as a base, he builds up stratified armatures with wooden battens, on to which generous quantities of oil paint in wax medium is applied. The combination of materials and techniques generates a sense of the layered, abrasive physicality of the landscape. In both construction and brushwork he favours jagged, open rhythms, so that we get the feeling of works in progress. His idea of finish is a state of dynamic equilibrium.

He delights in playing with the added possibilities afforded by three dimensions, describing deep hollows, gushes of water, corrie lakes and rugged outcrops. Paradoxically, as Jim Savage points out, although it is all about the reality of being in the landscape, there is an overt theatricality about it. The pieces are a little like stage sets in the way they broadly approximate their sources. A kind of mimicry is at work. They exert something of the fascination of scale models, evoking something real by virtue of their own contrived reality.

The guiding impetus in Wilson's work is surely a remarkable period in modern art, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was studying at third level and starting to work as an artist. Things were, for a while, wide open, and it seemed that everything about art's relationship with the world was ripe for redefinition and up for grabs. In a brief counter-cultural flowering, barriers between art, science, sociology and philosophy were momentarily irrelevant. A real flavour of the openness of that time, including a conviction that art should be a part of the world rather than part of the artworld, comes through in Groundworks.

There is something else, though, that is perhaps surprising - Wilson's evident passion for the landscape. Although he comes from Lancashire, he fell completely in love with the Irish landscape and grabbed the opportunity of jobs in, first, Limerick and then Dublin. As he describes it, there is an unbroken continuity for him between being out in the hills and conveying the experience in his work. And indeed that comes across visibly. There is a palpable sense of excited discovery in the way each work unfolds. The exploration of the landscape is perfectly counterpointed by the process of invention that goes into the work. It is a fine show in a perfect setting.