In Georges Perec's novel Life: A User's Manual, one of the many protagonists, Bartlebooth, devotes some 20 years to what sounds like a perversely self-defeating project. He travels the world, painting watercolours - his target is 500 - of the sunset at various ports. The watercolours are dispatched back to Paris, where another character, Gaspard Winckler, turns them into 750-piece jigsaws, which Bartlebooth reassembles before returning them to the locations at which they were painted and destroying them. "He wanted," writes Perec, "the whole project to come full circle without leaving a mark, like an oily sea closing over a drowning man." Bartlebooth's is not the only such project in the novel. In fact, if Perec's book is a manual, it is a manual not so much of life as of conceptual art.
It should come as no surprise that Noel Sheridan is an enthusiastic fan of Perec's book. Bartlebooth is Sheridan's kind of artist, for, like Perec, he has a mind that relishes such obscure, labyrinthine thought processes, such exquisite paradoxes, the marriage of seeming logic and subversive illogicality, the oblique commentary on the absurdity of things, the humour in extremis. So it was natural that, when he came upon John Banville's description, in his novel Athena, of "seven little fictional paintings", he realised "that's what I must do. Attempt those faux Claudes and Poussins."
Like Bartlebooth, he didn't quite succeed. He aimed to create, or recreate from Banville's cogent description, The Rape Of Proserpine by L. van Hobelijn. There were loose ends, false starts, digressions - and successes. But not one or, for that matter, seven faux Poussins or Claudes. Rather, a big chunk of Sheridan's exhibition at the Gallagher Gallery of the Royal Hibernian Academy, which also includes a selective retrospective, is given over to what he disparagingly calls a "bit of a shaggy-dog story", the evidence of his attempt to do something impossible.
We get a mass of material, including his studio, transported lock, stock and barrel to the Gallagher, preparatory sketches drawn and painted, complete paintings, myriad source material and a version of the apocryphal painting done on Photoshop, the image-manipulation software. "Well," he notes wryly, "I thought at least it was an adventure." But then he had lunch with the critic Cyril Barrett, as he relates in a postscript to his commentary, and Barrett brought up Jean-Paul Sartre's stricture on the definition of adventure, "which is that if you think of it as an adventure, then it's not an adventure." At which point, Sheridan writes: "I go home. Shattered."
When he came on that passage in Athena, he hadn't painted in 15 years. He was looking for a way back in, figuratively and, he points out, literally. "The great victory of modernism was that it revealed the truth of the shallowness of the picture plane. But, in the process, we lost that middle distance in which everything seems to happen; which is what Banville describes and what painters can no longer describe. We can't get back into those Arcadias." Mulling over Poussin, he thought of how the painter planned his works with the aid of elaborate miniature sets, inhabited by wax figures. "I though he would definitely have been into Photoshop."
Sheridan is the director of the National College of Art and Design. It is an important post in the cultural life of the Republic, but not the most obvious occupation for a man of his exceptional gifts and, more, his unorthodox disposition.
As the artist and writer Brian O'Doherty puts it, he discovered, arriving back from New York some years back, "that someone was masquerading in Noel Sheridan's name as the director of NCAD." To his surprise, it was indeed Sheridan, and, more surprising still, he proved an adept manager - "he handled committees beautifully." But why shouldn't that be the case, O'Doherty asked himself, given that Sheridan is like a one-man committee: director, painter, conceptual artist, performer, writer, Australian, Dubliner.
In fact, Sheridan is the son of a legendary Dubliner, the comedian Cecil Sheridan. It was not easy to be the child of such a figure or, he notes, acknowledging the selfless efforts of his mother, to be married to him. The humour was strictly professional.
On the other hand, he clearly learned or inherited a thing or two from "the Head", including stagecraft, timing, a knack for improvisation and a performer's instincts. And, perhaps, a sense of the surreal. In a brilliant autobiographical piece, he recalls being summoned to a theatre dressing room to be ticked off by his father, "and a three-foot-high friend of his" in a police costume, for skiving off and playing snooker.
"'It's wrong to upset your mother,' says the tiny policeman in a high voice.
"'This is serious,' says my father, putting on a blond wig, adjusting his bra and dress as he follows the tiny policeman out of the room."
Sheridan might well have followed his father onto the stage. After going to Synge Street Christian Brothers School, he worked as an office boy for Independent Newspapers and did a night course in business studies at Trinity College, Dublin. He also wrote and participated in the Trinity Players' revues, and Des McAvock recalls his appearance in James McKenna's The Scatterin'. His true love was painting, however.
His moodily romantic, gestural pieces from the late 1950s fit into their time but also suggest a strong personality, and were extremely well received. He married Liz Murphy and, on the basis of a Macauley Scholarship, they went to London and, later, New York.
With Sheridan working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, his paintings picked up a range of references, from Francis Bacon to Henri Matisse. "You work and work at something," he says of painting. "And you think, yes, I'm really getting somewhere with this, and you feel pretty good about it, and then you pick up a book and you say, oh right, Matisse was there in 1916. Start again."
The affectionately satirical Goodbye Old Paint, however, a "remake" of which is included in the Gallagher show, signalled a temporary farewell to painting in 1967. Conceptual art (and its myriad offshoots) was happening, and it was made for Sheridan. It was "a way of getting more and more things into the domain of visual art", he says. "It seemed you could beat the system - now, of course, it's in Tate Modern, it's canonical."
In fact, he produced more paintings, back in the Republic, before heading off for Australia in 1971. But Everybody Should Get Stones, the conceptual project that is probably his best-known work, was mapped out here. It, too, is in the Gallagher, and it remains an immediate, exceptionally rich work.
In Australia, Sheridan threw his energies into a radical venture when he became the director of the Experimental Art Foundation, in Adelaide. It is an institution, as one founder member, Donald Brook, recalls it, "committed to the doctrine that the essential nature of art makes it unassimilable to institutional comprehension."
Perec, one feels, would have approved. It was a chance, Sheridan says, to frame "anomalous, unfettered attempts to address the question of what it is to be in the world", part of the heady period, following the end of modernism, when arts practice "was characterised by crazy ambition. We were doing work that asks what it is to do art at all, in an alternative forum to the museum". Following a vigorous five years of ground-breaking activity in Adelaide, he returned to the Republic, to take up his post at NCAD.
He made another, less happy foray to Australia when he was lured back to be the director of Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in 1989, taking a five-year sabbatical from NCAD. As Brook observes, PICA was "explicitly, prominently, a public institution linked to the emergence of the new arts industry", while Sheridan is someone who surely believes that if there is an arts industry, then "it has little to do with art".
Which brings us to Dublin, now, and Sheridan's gradual re-engagement with his work. As he points out, if you're going to do "the administrative thing", then you've got to do it for real. You can't be a radical artist on your weekends.
But he's been applying himself to the problem. He never shed his showman's flair, of course. Brook recalls his farewell in Perth. Crowds of well-wishers assembled, waiting for his valedictory words, expecting "ritual acknowledgements, gracious regrets". They got Sheridan in costume, miming Ray Charles's Hit The Road Jack, complete with black-clad backing singers. His father would have liked his timing - "end high".
For all sorts of reasons, not least the fact that it is extremely entertaining, you should see his Gallagher Gallery show. It is accompanied by On Reflection (Four Courts Press, £14.84). Largely a compendium of writings on the man and his work, it is a big, appropriately discursive publication.
Among the best pieces is a brilliantly informative essay by O'Doherty, as well as Sheridan's contributions, including a dazzling account of his relationship with his father, a hallucinatory improvisation on the nature and appeal of painting and some engaging shaggy-dog stories.
Noel Sheridan's work is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery (01-6612558), Dublin, until October 21st
