Painted from a personal palette

Diana Copperwhite, an artist of energy and flair, makes paintings without alibis from art theory, neither ironic nor apologetic. And she largely succeeds in conveying 'reality, memory, and fantasy', writes Aidan Dunne

IN 1994 Diana Copperwhite, then a graduate fresh out of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), had a solo exhibition in the Temple Bar Gallery. It's quite unusual for a graduate to have a solo show so quickly, but Copperwhite's created quite a buzz for other reasons.

One: she was a painter, when art world orthodoxy had turned away from painting. Two: she was painter of tremendous energy and flair, capable of working on a large scale. She didn't make paintings that apologised for their own existence, that pretended to be conceptual art or ironic restatements of art history or parodies of high modernism. Nor were they self-consciously retro.

They were what they were. We could take them or leave them, like them or hate them, but they didn't look to art theory to provide any alibis.

In the event, many people liked them, a lot. These early paintings were boldly architectonic in that they seemed to mark out constructed spaces, enclosures and openings, though not in an overtly representational way.

Remarkably, Copperwhite arrived on the scene with a distinctive personal palette that has remained consistently her own. It's still evident in her current show at West Cork Arts Centre, Eclipse of a Title. Her palette is lyrical, tonally bright, with lots of colour, including lively juxtapositions of greens, pinks, yellows, blues and creams. The term "colourist" is widely misused, usually referring not to someone who is good with colour but to painters who lash it on conspicuously, who misuse it, essentially.

Even though colour is Copperwhite's stock in trade, she uses it judiciously; it's usually toned down towards off-white and grey, and has an edginess to it. Just as it seems that a painting is drifting towards pure mellowness it is, as she puts it herself, "suddenly pulled back by a sharp mark, a wake-up call".

While the freshness of her early work derived in part from the fact that it didn't feel the need to carry too much historical baggage, it would be wrong to characterise it as being historically uninformed or naive or, equally, oblivious of contemporary art in the broadest sense.

In fact, Copperwhite is one of a generation of younger artists, including Paul Doran and Mark Swords, for example, who feel able to engage with painting without perpetuating decades-old arguments about painting versus conceptualism but who are, nonetheless, well-informed about the arguments.

As a contemporary of hers who knows her quite well puts it, if you're going to talk about some aspect of contemporary art with Copperwhite, you'd better be sure of your ground, because the chances are she's seen more, thought about it more and reached surer conclusions than you have.

She has a reputation for going through galleries, museums and art fairs with an omnivorous eye, absorbing as much as she can, yet despite the sheer quantity of things seen, her capacity for remembering individual works in detail is exceptional.

Five years after finishing at NCAD she spent a year in Barcelona on Winchester School of Art's MA programme. She enjoyed it, though, of all the European countries, she says that Italy remains the closest to her heart, something that makes sense in terms of the light and colour of her work. In 2007 she won the AIB Art Award.

As her work has developed since 1994, you could say that she has stepped back from the exuberant openness of those early paintings. In them, she clearly relished the sheer plastic possibilities of paint as a medium, and there was a rapt lyricism to her exploration of pictorial architecture, as though she had somehow gained access to a space that turned out to be exactly her element.

That's also a reasonable way to describe what she has gone on to accomplish since, but the kinds of pictorial space she deals with have become more complicated, more layered with memory and experience, and they address a much broader range of content, often via representational imagery. In mood and atmosphere, her recent paintings are correspondingly more nuanced and ambivalent.

SINCE SHE COMPLETED her MA, her solo exhibitions have been titled. With each body of work, she says, she's been concerned "to add another element without taking away from what's already there - and I'm quite happy that I've managed to do that".

Midnightand In a Certain Lightwere at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, and last year's Blind Spotwas at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. It's immediately noticeable that all of them refer to constraints on visibility and seeing, as does Eclipse of a Title. She selects titles instinctively.

Of Eclipse, she says: "I don't know. I was trying to get at this idea of there being something there, but also something blocking it, something in the way." It's about seeing, though not seeing.

It's true that everything we do see in her paintings appears fleeting and contingent. Faces and figures feature recurrently, but they are embodied in apparently arbitrary arrangements of colour that ignore naturalistic convention. It's as if paint flows swiftly through the pictures, assuming momentary configurations. She draws on myriad sources, on photographs and other kinds of images that have a personal meaning for her, as well as images that don't, including material from newspapers, magazines, television and the internet. Feature films, television programmes, technical diagrams and illustrations are all referred to, but ultimately the categories of her imagery are probably not as important as the fact of availability, the way all these things impinge on consciousness, "as if we're at a crossroads in terms of information; it's coming at us from all directions, but what are we to do with it?" Certain motifs recur, including the circle, and the screen.

Perhaps what she is aiming for is a means of conveying a sense of a mental space. She has referred to wanting to convey a mixture of "reality, memory and fantasy", in other words an approximation of consciousness. In our heads, we routinely deal with many different kinds of images, but fluidly, not as a series of fixed, separate entities.

Similarly, the process of memory has been visualised in two markedly different ways, as a set of static images to be selectively accessed, and as something much more malleable and dynamic. Narrative conventions tidy up mental processes, but Copperwhite seems to prefer the heterogeneous mix as it is, reflecting our tentative bids to make sense of an impinging world.

In describing his own work, the writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz referred to a vision of the world in a state of flux, in which "reality takes on certain shapes merely for the sake of appearance, as a joke or form of play . . . Shape does not penetrate essence, it is only a role adopted for the moment."

More recently, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard suggested that we live in a state of "hyperreality," an environment composed entirely of simulations or representations. In a sense, you could say that Copperwhite presents us with a world of simulations, but they have not, as in Baudrillard's theories, replaced or eclipsed the real. Rather, they are much closer to Schulz's conception of transient form; offering glimpses of a persistent reality underlying the restless play of images.

Eclipse of a Title: Paintings and Other Works by Diana Copperwhiteis at West Cork Arts Centre, North Street, Skibbereen, until Nov 19. The exhibition will travel to the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, later this month and to the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, in March