Renaissance man - in a shed

AIB prizewinner Paul Doran manages to build on previous work - and depart from it. The painter has vowed to challenge his comfort zone, he tells Aidan Dunne

Paul Doran's paintings can inspire extreme reactions, as he discovered last year at the time of a solo show of his work at the Green on Red Gallery. In a move that disconcerted many of his admirers, he made a transition from small, intense, jewel-like abstracts to perplexing, schematic, architectonic compositions, with references to medieval and renaissance artists. During the course of the exhibition, he took part in a public interview at the gallery. A substantial crowd turned up. To his surprise, talk turned quickly to his earlier work.

Immersed in the process of making the paintings, he hadn't looked at them in the context of what he'd done previously. "It only struck me then the extent to which people who collected the earlier work were really involved in it."

There was a sense of thwarted expectation in relation to the exhibition, and a certain puzzlement as to why he had changed direction. While he was taken off balance by the public response, he did know that he had changed direction, and the change is consolidated by Man in a Shed, his current show in the Sligo Art Gallery, which, among other things, elaborates on his exploration of the depiction of space in early Renaissance painting.

Winning the AIB Art Award last year (for which he was nominated by Áine O'Gara, a board member of the Sligo Art Gallery) was important for him.

"I feel I've been lucky since I graduated, but nothing has been as good as the acknowledgement of that award. It gave me a great boost. I didn't expect to win - painting doesn't usually win. Having the opportunity to document work in a good publication has been brilliant. I've had a lot of interest from galleries abroad, so it's invaluable to have something like that to pass on to them."

HE FEELS THE impression of discontinuity in his work was perhaps more dramatic than it should have been because, while there were transitional paintings, so to speak, they had only been exhibited abroad.

It's worth pointing out that many people really loved his earlier work for its self-conscious, painterly lushness. The paintings are overtly attractive objects. It's not that he thinks any less of them now, but he felt change was necessary.

"There were a few things going on, including the fact that I'd started to challenge my own comfort zone. I was very conscious that I was labelled as a guy who did a particular kind of thing, that was my gig."

While he could have gone on and on refining that one thing, "I did feel I'd exhausted that area of thickly painted, seductive surfaces. I asked myself what exactly was going on there, beyond a certain point. Looking around at contemporary painting, and painting in general, I began asking myself what kind of issues it should deal with, what kind of paintings I should be making."

The answer was that he make paintings that were more conceptually demanding, of himself and inevitably of the viewer as well. Last year's show at Green and Red was presented within the framework of a conversation with Gislebertus, renowned 12th-century sculptor. Rather than looking only at contemporary trends, Doran has gone right back to the beginnings of Western painting.

"I started to look back, at the pre-Renaissance Sienese painters, at how they deal with space. I've always been interested in the idea of something being hand-made, and now there is such an emphasis on smooth, technological production in art, in moving away from hand-made things. So there is the question of how hand-made things can play a role in contemporary art practice."

With many pre- and early Renaissance painters there is a tremendous sense of exploration and discovery in their attempts to represent complex scenes. The excitement of conceptualising architectonic spaces comes across in their images which are clearly hand-made, tentative and imperfect but amazingly beautiful and, surprisingly, often quite minimalist. Fra Angelico's architectural settings can have an almost John Pawson look about them.

"I have been very engaged with Fra Angelico," Doran notes. "I think he is extraordinary. There's a panel in the National Gallery, which was on loan to New York for exhibition, The Attempted Martyrdom of SS Cosmos and Damien with their Brothers, from San Marco in Florence, which is quite incredible. I go to see it regularly. I'll stand in front of it for an hour quite happily, yet I'm still not quite sure what it is about it that intrigues me so much. There is something about the space in the picture, and the way the space is depicted, that fascinates me."

The paintings in the Sligo show are untitled, which is something of a departure, yet paradoxically they are perhaps the most representational things that Doran has exhibited, with clear quotations of architectural details and a palette that also refers directly to pre- and early Renaissance painting. A recurrent, irregularly spherical, concentric form was also apparent in last year's show.

"Ah," Doran says, "someone referred to that as a fried egg. It came from something Philip Guston said in an interview. He spoke about longing to find a kind of universal form that he could continually paint, that would encompass everything he wanted to say in paint. It seemed to me that it would have been terrible if he's succeeded - think of all the great paintings we wouldn't have now. So I have this form that at first seems to be something, or seems to be trying to be something, but then eventually you realise it is nothing. So it's a bit disorientating and ambiguous."

Although they are more variable in terms of the sheer quantity of pigment they contain, many of his new paintings are on a par with their predecessors. "I didn't build them up deliberately," Doran points out. "What you see is determined by the amount of failure underneath. At the same time, I like the idea that there is no mistaking the fact that these are physical things, I'm still interested in that."

To that end, he has on occasion collaged cut-out sections of pigment onto the paint surface - a "hand-made" reference. He has also bombarded some of the surfaces with big blobs of paint. These blobs are both part of the paintings and apart from the surface. "They draw attention to the surface, I think."

They also have to do with the question of figure and ground. He points to the arbitrary way figures can appear in early European painting: "for example, floating in the air. They seem to be apart from the space they occupy."

EVER SINCE HIS fine art degree show in NCAD in 1997, Doran has been exceptionally industrious, showing widely here and abroad. He has always seen himself in an international context, not in any egotistical sense, but out of curiosity about what is going on internationally in painting and out of a rigorously self-critical instinct.

He judges his own work very harshly and against the widest field of contemporary art. He has also been very successful, attracting attention at home and abroad. It takes considerable nerve to establish a profile and then to slip out of it, but he is unfazed. "I've been lucky," he says, "in that people have responded to the work."

That applies to his recent work as well. "The interesting thing is that, when it was shown at the Miami Art Fair, it appealed to a different kind of gallery." So he experienced no qualms at changing gear. "I'm reconciled to the fact that, if I'm going to go on making paintings, I have to be strong enough to go with it and stand over what I do, though I know collectors can come at things from a different perspective."

That perspective can be constraining for artists, he believes. "I think in a way art fairs have a lot to answer for. They promote a certain kind of look, which puts pressure on artists to conform. I'd have to say I've been exposed to a certain amount of that way of thinking. In a way it's . . . well, the word 'easy' comes to mind, but for me, you have to engage with ideas that are worth pursuing; it has to be interesting for me if it's going to be interesting for the viewer."

The title of his show, taken from a song by Nick Drake, could be taken as referring to the artist in a studio. He concurs, but adds: "It's also about the idea of self-imposed isolation as a means of engaging with the work. And I have to say I also agree with Drake's ideas about the importance of reconnecting with nature."

He's quite open about where his work will lead next, but feels he's on a promising path.

"It could be that the work will become more figurative, I don't know. I was looking at the most recent painting I made for the show and it seems to suggest possibilities to me. Often it's like that - your last work provides you with clues about which way to go."

Man in a Shed, paintings by Paul Doran, is at the Sligo Art Gallery until Apr 29

This year's AIB Prize short-listed artists and nominating galleries are: Sean Lynch (Limerick City Gallery of Art); Austin McQuinn (Butler Gallery, Kilkenny); Eamon O'Kane (Draíocht, Dublin); Linda Quinlan (Crawford Municipal Art Gallery). The winner will be announced on May 3