VISUAL ARTS: There is an appropriately summery quality to John Wonnacott's paintings at Éigse Carlow Arts Festival. Wonnacott is one of those quirky individualists who periodically emerge in British art, writes Aidan Dunne.
He is a representational painter with a singular, idiosyncratic vision and tremendous energy, delivering his intricately composed pictures with great bravura and pace.
There is a palpable excitement to his surfaces, as if he's trying to pin down a fleeting vision before the whole thing disappears forever. Pictorial excitement is generated by other means as well. He loves dramatically wide angles of vision, compositions built on vertiginously receding perspectives, plunging away from centres of stillness in the foreground.
If there is a sky, clouds will be dancing, twisting and scudding across it pell-mell and vapour trails will twist into the distance. If the painting depicts an interior by night, electric light will bounce furiously around the room, reflected and multiplied by windows and paintwork and imparting a giddy, nervy quality to otherwise still and ordinary scenes.
For the world Wonnacott describes is an everyday one, mostly centred on his coastal home and studio and its blustery, bustling surroundings. Studio scenes, often involving friends and domestic routine and expansive, sunlit exteriors, are his stock-in-trade. Yet although there is a pronounced informality to studies of casual banquets of seafood and other aspects of daily routine indoors and out, there is also something extremely formalised about the paintings.
This relates to their highly organised optical construction, but not to that alone. A moment's reflection makes clear that the ostensibly casual set-ups of figures and still lifes are highly contrived - positively theatrical, in fact, usually so in a way that alludes to art history or, more accurately, the history of Western painting, with broad hints provided in the form of the postcards and other reproductions liberally displayed on surfaces in the studio. Perhaps Wonnacott's work, particularly seen en masse, can be too frenetic for its own good, but as several pieces here demonstrate he can do quieter, calmer images as well.
Wonnacott takes pride of place in this year's visual programme, but, as usual, his show is augmented by other strong presences. They include the Chinese painter Chen Yifei, who moved to the West and built a successful career with the backing of wealthy patrons. He is now back in China and, judging by his pictures of Tibetan subjects, is not afraid to ruffle feathers. Stylistically, though, while technically very assured, his work is conservative, consisting of a kind of picturesque realism.
The Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz is associated with concentrations of figures, individuals en masse, and her set of self-portrait bronze heads and a small, dispersed group of fragmentary, childlike figures give a flavour but not a real taste of what she is about. Rough-textured and elliptical, her sculpture has overtones of trauma and anxiety.
Several Irish artists with distinguished records get compact solo shows to themselves. They include Anne Madden, who shows just three of her lusciously coloured Icarus series; Tim Goulding, with a number of highly formalised, meditative, iridescent paintings characteristically attentive to light and texture; and Jacqueline Stanley, whose beautifully composed linear landscapes are brilliant arrangements of pattern and space.
Of those who haven't been on the scene that long, Judy Hamilton is the most impressive. In the past few years her landscape-based work has developed to an exceptional degree. The boldly gestural, atmospherically coloured group of paintings she exhibits here have an immediacy and freshness that evoke a physical engagement with place. Hamilton has consistently painted fairly ordinary rural places, basing her pictures not on such qualities as exceptional natural beauty in a conventional sense but on the vividness of being there. The natural beauty she describes is low-key. Her pictorial instincts are good, and she is not afraid to take chances.
It's good to see strong figurative drawing, as exemplified by the work of Sahoko Blake in forceful studies of sumo wrestlers and couples wrestling with relationships. Niamh Moran's hand-painted monoprints relish the dreamlike state of childhood play and recreation. Her stylised, highly coloured images, in which action drifts in and out of the frame, nod towards animation and strikingly evoke a space half-imagined, half-real.
Mark de Freyne fits into a line of Irish landscape painters, including Tony O'Malley and Patrick Collins, whose work he refers to and whose painterly languages he employs. John Lalor shows a series of his Democratic Paintings, repetitive treatments of a single image that aim to both undermine and open out its available meanings.
Carlow Institute of Technology is showing polished work by Robbie O'Halloran, whose paintings, which rely on nuances of touch and motif and harness chance with design, have a cool elegance.
Christophe G. Neumann inventively recycles commercial packaging to make abstract, linguistic or pictorial motifs. His Funnel, a giant web, is nicely sited in the library.
Emily Strange's works on paper imbue images of toys and teddy bears with sinister references to violence and disharmony; Kerry Ann Lapping's video, about partial ways of imparting knowledge, is, appropriately, showing in a lecture theatre.
The 25th Éigse Carlow Arts Festival provides, as ever, a painless whistle-stop tour of a good cross section of contemporary art in Ireland and elsewhere.
Exhibitions continue at St Patrick's College and Carlow Institute of Technology from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today, tomorrow and Sunday. You can get more details by calling 059-9140491 or by visting www.eigsecarlow.com
