Where have the people gone?

Eithne Jordan's latest work was inspired by the the sense of mystery inherent in vacated social spaces, she tells Aidan Dunne

Eithne Jordan's exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery is the culmination of a series of shows, all featuring paintings that come under the general heading City. This body of work sees Jordan moving away from the Languedoc in southern France, where she is based for much of the time, and looking to the contemporary urban environment for subject matter. It began with a residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris at the invitation of the then director, Helen Carey, and a subsequent exhibition there under the auspices of the current director, Sheila Pratschke. Since then there have been several shows throughout Ireland as the City work evolved.

To date, not only Paris but also Rotterdam and Barcelona have provided Jordan with a rich seam of material for painting. Not that any of the cities is immediately recognisable as a setting. As Gemma Tipton notes in an accompanying publication, the paintings are "not about the icons of architecture . . . that each city manufactures to put itself on the map of tourist consciousness". Rather, Jordan is drawn to anonymous urban spaces, to the platforms of Paris Metro stations, the gable ends of looming apartment blocks, the blank, functional exteriors of modernist office buildings, and haphazard clearings in the urban jungle.

Apart from the pallid artificial illumination of the Metro, these spaces are often depicted in the half-light of evening, as electric light of several colours starts to glow against the gathering dusk. The Rotterdam paintings capture the subdued, brooding light that accompanies snowfall, while several Barcelona works follow the sinuous patterns of scooter lamps and brake lights reflected in rain-sodden ground. Although evidence of habitation is everywhere, with the exception of the Barcelona images an explicit human presence is rare, so that there is a melancholy vacancy to most of the scenes, something greatly accentuated by Jordan's treatment of the nuances of colour and tone.

Jordan began her Paris paintings with the aim of capturing something of the city's distinctive moody light. She edited figures out of some images, including the Metro scenes. "Once the figures are there," she observes, "it turns it into something else, it carries it into the area of narrative, which I don't want."

She likes the sense of mystery inherent in views of vacated social spaces. "You know that feeling of travelling by train through a foreign city, just as the light is fading, and you get fleeting glimpses into other people's worlds, and you wonder about them but you will never know?"

She is a consummately unshowy painter, one who never advertises her technique or makes a superfluous gesture, although she was, at an earlier stage, a forthrightly gestural artist, and she first became established under the wide umbrella of Neo-Expressionism. Although she was born in Dublin, studied at Dún Laoghaire School of Art and was a founder-member of one of the first group studio schemes in Ireland, she has spent a great deal of her working life abroad. A scholarship brought her to Berlin in 1984, and she stayed there until 1989, the year the Wall came down.

"I felt an extraordinary affinity with this walled, insular, and in many ways ugly city," she wrote. Not the least of its appeal was that "it gave me a standpoint, a distance, from my own country".

She still likes to maintain a certain distance. From the beginning of the 1990s, she has spent much of her time each year in a small village close to Montpellier in the south of France.

"I feel I've benefited from being in a place where I'm an outsider," she says. "I actually like that relationship to the world where you are something of a stranger."

Being an outsider, she agrees, grants her more room for manoeuvre. She is not hugely attached to place: "Ideally I'd like to find a balance between Ireland and somewhere like France." She doesn't particularly miss Dublin, for example, and feels she could be content in rural Mayo or Cork.

She has visited the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in north Co Mayo for several years, and likes it.

"I painted a lot of the Rotterdam work there," she says. "It was strange: there I was in the middle of this vast empty landscape making paintings of the city. I wasn't sure it would work, but it did. Except that I got hooked on the landscape - no verticals to speak of except the poles holding the power lines - and every so often I'd sneak off to paint it."

Her work is notable for its restless development. Some artists find a style and stick with it, elaborating it endlessly. Jordan has shown a conspicuous willingness to move on. Her early, very capable abstracts gave way to landscape subjects, before she began to treat figurative themes, exploring human relationships through the filter of her own experiences. Once established in the south of France, she painted the interior of her house, then broadened her aim to encompass the surrounding environment.

This French work, particularly, informs her City paintings. In her interiors, it is as if she is waking up to the way spaces are modulated by light, and there is a sculptural feeling to the images.

As she looked to the landscape, she took on board the classicism of Poussin, and the magisterial serenity of his compositions has been an enduring influence. Gradually she incorporated more and more intrusive contemporary detail, such as incongruous rural housing and motorways.

"When I'd worked with the landscape for a long time, I started to paint still life," she says. "In a way, I think I was retreating to the studio to examine what exactly I was doing."

That presaged what was, for her, a major change of approach. "I started to use a camera, and that was a real liberation for me. As a representational artist, you're tied to a particular place and you have an intense relationship with that place. With a camera, you can have a different kind of relationship to place. You don't have to physically be there, you're not a slave to place."

Mind you, she uses photography in a very particular way, employing a digital camera. "I like the flatness of digital images. I use the camera as a convenient tool, like a sketchbook. I'm not trying to take great photographs. They're not interesting as photographs. I'll take hundreds of images, and go through them on the computer, and maybe a half-dozen will have something useful, something I can work with. I print them on ordinary typing paper, because again I like that flatness. One side-effect is that I miss drawing now, though, because photography has become drawing for me. I'm very conscious of that and I'm looking at ways of bringing drawing back into the process."

She notes that when you make a drawing, you consciously take what you want from the place, you edit the information. Whereas, looking through photographs, you find things that you weren't consciously looking for but that are, perhaps, useful. Interestingly, she acknowledges, she is not quite sure what that is.

"I don't know what I'm looking for when I work in the studio, but something will suddenly look promising, something that might look bad as a photograph. It's all to do with the light, maybe. The photograph will define the buildings and the spaces, but everything else is to do with painting and light."

Her first step is to make small studies in gouache. "If there's a problem I can't resolve in gouache, if it doesn't seem to work, I know there's no point in trying to do it in oil."

She loves the routine of the studio and works an eight-hour day five or six days a week - every day if she is under pressure. "Some people work round the clock for a few months to produce a show. I just can't do that. I need time to let things mature. Compared to the work I was doing back in the 1980s, this is much slower. The surface needs a rightness to it. It's a slow, reflective process, and often it's just a very subtle shift in tone or colour that makes the difference, just a tiny shift and the whole thing comes alive."

City, paintings by Eithne Jordan, is at the Rubicon Gallery until Dec 22; www.rubicongallery.ie