Taking Root on gallery walls

Between the hectic rush of exhibitions in New York and Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery, painter Ruth Root explains how vital isolation has become to her while making her new work. Belinda McKeonwrites.

The weekend gallery crawlers are all over New York's Chelsea, spilling from one glass-fronted space to another, or moving between floors in the huge, anonymous-looking buildings that serve as repositories here for so many art spaces, a gallery on every floor, a gallery at every door. Clean, bright spaces opening up behind every grubby brick wall, every heavy iron door, these still semi-industrial streets are a warren of white cubes.

Around them, the viewers stride with catalogues and price lists in hand, sharp of eye but perhaps sharper of clobber; as with so much in Manhattan, the weekend scene in Chelsea is largely about being seen. But who's complaining? At least it means that the art, too, is seen. There are few empty galleries here, few bored curators staring out the hours between visitors, few tufts of tumbleweed taking their metaphorical tumbles across the poured cement floors. There's a constant buzz.

In the middle of it, at the Andrew Kreps Gallery on 22nd Street, there's a man tearing through the single room of paintings with a one-year-old boy held aloft like an offering; running, literally racing, and making a sound like an over-excited Spitfire. It's a game of airplane, bounded by four walls of brightly coloured aluminum panels which could almost be fins from retro aircraft, and which could also be weirdly vibrant clouds outside the windows of this hyperactive vessel, so soft and almost dream-like are the curves of these skin-thin panels, their bubbled merging of gently rounded edges.

The man laughs, the child squeals, the canter continues. To a viewer coming in from the street, it could almost be an installation; it has that pure focus, that intensity, that madness. But it's just the artist's husband trying to keep their son entertained while his mother does an interview.

RUTH ROOT STANDS and watches the show for a while, a smile on her face, her eyes now on the sleek forms of her paintings, now on the whirling dervish of her husband and her boy. Putting this show together in the year after her son was born, she suggests later, was a matter of everything that is opposite to the noise and energy of this mini gallery scene, this private burst of the Chelsea buzz, but also opposite to the larger scene, to the New York intensity she sought out in the early 1990s as a young artist hungry for the artistic community and stimulation that she felt only this city could provide.

"Working on this show and having a child, the isolation has been pretty incredible," says Root. The isolation has been entirely self- created, something she has come to see as vital, now, to her practice. "To be able to work and have a child, I felt like I needed to be able to work at night all the time, and to give up seeing friends." She isn't glum about these late nights, though, these lost connections. "I think in a way that it was really good for the work," she says. "It has become this whole world of its own. And to not be influenced by other people and other people's sense of colour and their ideas about work . . . it was finally a good time for me to be isolated."

Root is in Dublin this week to take part in Unique Act, a non-figurative show at the Hugh Lane Gallery which brings together the work of Root, Sean Scully, Frederic Matys Thursz, Carmengloria Morales and Seán Shanahan as part of the gallery's centenary celebration, and in recognition, too, of Scully's gift of several of his own paintings to the gallery in 2006. There is an irony to her insistence that she has, of late, been shrugging off external influence; the press release for her New York show consists not of the usual four paragraphs about models and innovation and form, but of a picture essay, by Root, about everything she can think of as having been an influence on her latest work. There are artworks - the shaped pieces of Ellsworth Kelly, the sliced walls of Gordon Matta-Clark, the negative spaces of Bruce Nauman, the paintings of Philip Guston - but also objects, images, snapshots of an imaginative life which is as offbeat as Root's colour palette. Among these are pictures of a contoured toilet mat, of a pair of ski socks, of the matching dresses and wallpaper in the 1964 movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, of Mexican retablo paintings, religious iconography created in oil on copper or tin. "I feel like I always have trouble writing the press release, and defining what the work is about in some kind of language structure," Root says of this mish-mash of images. "And as for influence, as an artist you do have to absorb everything out there, and know the past, and know everything to be in a dialogue. And these are all things I've seen around, and not all of them are artist influences."

Of those influences which are not to be found in a gallery space, Root can speak just as eloquently as about those which are. The toilet mat, she explains, made her think about the marking out, the realisation, of typically negative or unrecognised space; curve and form where only absence had been.

The ski socks, with their zingy hues, seem to have informed, or at least to have tapped into, Root's very particular colour palette. In the Cherbourg film, she was interested in how figure and ground melted into one another, how the main character's clothes always exactly matched the pattern of the walls behind her, the things around her.

A frankly comic photograph of a figure in a Halloween ghost costume, meanwhile, peering around a tree, refers to the white elements at the edges of her paintings that seem quite literally to disappear into the wall, to muddy and query the distinction between work and environment, between art and space.

THIS TENSION BETWEEN figure and ground is one which has been crucial to Root's work since its beginnings, when she was an undergraduate painter at Brown University and, afterwards, a graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Gorging, as a student, on theories of feminism and semiotics - on the same dependence on theory which marked all work at those schools at this time - she made then, she says, a lot of "conceptual-type" work, abstract pieces with tiny eyes and lit cigarettes built into them, the kinds of pieces with which she would go on to make her name relatively quickly once she moved to New York after art school. So, as much as the memory of those "smoking paintings" seems to make her blush nowadays, she need hardly disown them completely.

"Those paintings were abstract, but they were also about the abstract painters themselves, about the painters standing back thinking about their paintings," she says. "As if the paintings themselves took on the self-reflection of what it meant to be a painter and how paintings related to each other. The act of just contemplating and pondering a painting was kind of connected to a cigarette, to standing back. So the paintings were just standing back, being aware of their gallery space, being aware of all the thought that goes into thinking about painting, deconstructing the language of painting."

Over the 15 years since leaving art school and Chicago, Root says, she has slowly shed the framework of theory, and of self- consciousness about theory, which she acquired there, though some elements of her early work have continued through to the pieces she is making now. Her newest works, abstract pieces in enamel paint on shaped panels of aluminum so thin they seem as delicate as tracing paper, are fitted more closely to the walls of the gallery than in any of her previous exhibitions. It as though her work, as it evolves, is at once intent on becoming its own environment and on absorbing itself completely into the space that is the gallery, on drifting out of solidity - despite Root's industrial materials - into a kind of aura or presence in the gallery, like a haze of insanely shaded breath left on a pane of glass.

Root has been reading a lot about the phenomenon of synaesthesia, she says, and has evolved a colour palette that is entirely private, and slightly bizarre, but that is also completely logical, mathematical, a precise internal logic of light and dark, of secondary and tertiary shades, that comes out looking like an inverted, dream-fuddled version of the traditional colour wheel. People tell Root these paintings look like old car doors, like cartoon windows, like speech bubbles, like the graphics of 1960s film and TV. When she comes to Dublin this week for the Hugh Lane show, I tell her, she's bound to hear some references to the old RTÉ test card, that blob of garish colours that, on late-night television screen, hovered and buzzed with its own synaesthesia.

As intensely non-figurative as it is, her work, says Root, has always had some relationship to the figure. The eyes and cigarettes were flashily anthropomorphic, but the new pieces, too, "have some kind of movement in the way a figure does. They lean to one side, or they float back and forth. I think, before, my work referred to the figure but never had a figure in it. But all of these works, though they are non- figurative, all have some kind of human reference, some kind of humour and humanity."

And that's even without the added element of the man-plus-boy plane.

Unique Act, non-figurative painting by Frederic Matys Thursz, Sean Scully, Carmengloria Morales, Seán Shanahan and Ruth Root is at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh lane from tomorrow until May 25.