Visual Arts: There is a basic template to Alexis Harding's work. Using paint as a medium, he subjects the right- angled grid, a veritable emblem of order and modernity, to intolerable pressures, and allows us to witness the results. His paintings are always in a state of disintegration.
Things fall apart, in slow motion. Like Callum Innes, Ian Davenport, Gary Hume and Paul Doran, he destabilises the painting process.
He does so by creating conditions in which the natural properties of the paint are used against itself, or against our conventional view of a painting as something organised, fixed and finished.
To start with, Harding makes beds of oil colour. He has a liking for bold, synthetic-looking colours, such as garish pinks, though as time goes by he has tended more towards primaries and even - in one painting in his current show at the Rubicon Gallery - earth tones. Working wet on wet, he lays a grid pattern in gloss paint on to this ground. It is a high-risk strategy. Who knows what the failure rate is, but it must be high, because the interaction of the two elements has to depend on luck as well as judgment, though it seems as if Harding has become increasingly adept at managing the process.
As with Innes, gravity is vital to the procedures he follows. A painting can be left flat, can be tilted slightly, can be hung vertically. Each piece is overseen and nursed along. As a piece dries, a fragile skin forms. Tilt it slightly and the skin stretches and strains and eventually tears. The right-angled lines are distorted and broken. The works are never quite stable. They are given to sagging and collapse, but not quite to the extent of the paintings in the Rubicon now.
Harding has recently started to carry the process one stage further, making site-specific paintings that flow on to the ground, creating viscous pools of pigment at their bases.
He has also developed in other ways: Chorus leaves the grid behind for a set of broad parallel lines, generating quite a different and interesting kind of surface dynamic.
As with the work of Innes, the underlying idea throughout is simple and metaphorically rich, and its effectiveness depends on the artist's adherence to precise, self-imposed rules.
Even as they present images of loss and decay, the paintings are eloquent and elegant. The tall columnar form in Secure Destruction resembles a skyscraper. More abstractly, there is also an association with the three laws of thermodynamics, pithily formulated as: You can't win, you can't break even, you can't get out of the game. Or perhaps with Rilke's grim assessment of the human condition, in which we perpetually rearrange the chaos of our lives and the world around us until we fall apart ourselves.
Harding gets all these messages across, and in a surprisingly upbeat way, in his most accomplished show to date in Ireland.
Over-ripeness, excess and virtuosity are traditional features of still life, and death-in-life is one of its traditional messages. Geraldine O'Neill, one of the foremost Irish exponents of the still popular genre, and one who has consistently and inventively treated it in terms of contemporary idiom, tackles all these aspects head-on in her current show at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Sli na Firinne (The Way of Truth). The show is dedicated to her stillborn child, Brian.
O'Neill's characteristic approach to still life is one of greedy vitality: the surfaces of her paintings are crammed with incident and things. The incident is painterly, for part of what they are about is oil pigment's seductive capacity for representing the physical world. Our eyes negotiate crammed displays in O'Neill's compositions.
In terms of things, they are promiscuously eclectic. Anything within reach is likely to be sucked into the depiction machine.
Anything includes the traditional subjects of drink and foodstuffs, here exemplified in fish and poultry, even a pig's head, vegetables fresh and preserved, and fruit. The folds of drapery and creases in paper, the grain of wood - all are relished. But children's toys, balloons, sweets and even the tools of the painter's trade are also thrown into the mix.
A sense of glut and excess, heightened by the use of harsh, garish colours, is offset by the presence of dead birds - not game birds, just stilled songbirds - which also feature in starker pictures that muse on the uneasy relationship between appearance and reality.
The proposition might be that a painting is actually about something beyond immediate appearances, that appearances engage and entertain us while something else is going on. The show's centrepiece is a remarkable portrait of O'Neill's son, Fiach, astride a mechanical toy giraffe. In her catalogue essay Dr Yvonne Scott notes that the source for the composition is Velasquez's celebrated equestrian portrait of the young Prince Baltasar Carlos. O'Neill is taking a hard-headed look at the notion of a world that seems to promise us so much but is not, ultimately ours, not for us. Empires crumble, and it is, after all, just a toy giraffe against a painted backdrop. Fiach holds a paintbrush in his hand. Artistic acuity can see beyond appearances to an underlying, valuable truth.
Partly inspired by FE McWilliams's sculptures of figures caught up in bomb blasts in Northern Ireland, Ray Murphy, in his exhibition Flung at the Origin Gallery, depicts figures falling or flying through the air.
His intention is to convey what it's like to be in the midst of circumstances outside of our control. In fact the show features works from another, comparable series, as well, of individuals lost in thought. In both, there is a reference to what is going on in people's minds but remains unseen by us.
That is, Murphy doesn't provide any explanatory narrative frameworks. Each piece is about inner states that remain unknown to us but to which we can, all the same, relate.
It is as though he is trying to create and maintain a sense of an abstract, reflective space. His images are as much drawn as painted, in a very direct, linear manner. Spontaneity and speed are necessary to achieve the kind of simple immediacy he is after, but some images comes across as being too cursory, lacking touch and finesse.
That said, there is a very engaging, attractive quality to the work as a whole and the rationale behind it.
Reviewed
Paintings, Alexis Harding, Rubicon Gallery until June 17(01-6708055)
Slí na Firinne, Geraldine O'Neill, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until June 2 (01-8740064)
Flung, Ray Murphy, Origin Gallery until June 4 (01) 4785159
