The Eurojet Futures exhibit highlights contrary artists who have 'made it' -but for whom the extra boost never hurts, writes Aidan Dunne.
From the 18th century, the Louvre's Salon d'Apollon was the venue for group exhibitions by members of the French Royal Academy. These shows eventually became annual events with rules and procedures that varied with the political climate. By 1863, so much interest surrounded the excluded works that Napoleon III ordered a separate exhibition for it. Despite taking a drubbing from critics, the rejects' show, Salon des Refuses, became the place to be seen, setting the tone for exhibitions since.
Throughout the 20th century the element of contrariness essential to the notion of the avant garde demanded the continual redefinition of what constituted a Salon des Refuses. The seminal Brit Art show, Freeze, organised by Damien Hirst, was just such a salon. Oddly, though, because everybody wants to be seen as an outsider, institutional exhibitions, in- cluding the Young Contemporaries, Beck's Futures, the Turner Prize and, in Ireland, the GPA Emerging Artists Award, the Glen Dimplex Award, and currently the AIB Artist's Award, have sought to spiritually align themselves with the refuses. After all, that's where the action is.
Against a post-modern landscape of plurality and artistic promiscuity, the outsider label has become harder and harder to identify as the turnaround from outsider to insider accelerates. That doesn't stop everyone from trying. While there is something awful about being identified as the Next Big Thing - like being labelled as the British hope at Wimbledon - the fact is that many of these shows have targeted artists at a vital moment in their career, giving them a much-needed and well-deserved boost.
Which brings us to the Eurojet Futures show at the RHA. This is the second of a series of three, designed to pick up on artists who have made an impact and displayed some staying power. The seven included artists, selected by RHA Director Patrick T. Murphy, run a broad range of ages and media, from painting to performance, with a pronounced emphasis on photography and video.
Is it a Salon des Refuses? Well, no in the sense that it pragmatically recognises a plurality of endeavour in a judiciously non-partisan, non-evangelical way. Yes in the sense that, while by and large these artists are doing well and have all amassed estimable bodies of work, they are still vulnerable to the practical pressures of making a living. The Irish art-buying public can be slow to embrace new talent.
For obvious reasons, commercial galleries can also be slow to take on and nurture younger artists, though there are exceptions. Green on Red has many long established artists on its books, but it's also in the nurturing business, and represents Eurojet artist David Timmons. In the past Timmons has made striking sculptural pieces based on mass-produced, utilitarian casings. Now he works in collaboration with Cathal Connaughton under the label Audiovideodisco (they are showing a film at Eurojet). Galleries such as the Kevin Kavanagh or the Cross, those which concentrate on artists at an early stage of their careers, have quite a hard time of it, as evidenced by the fact that the Paul Kane Gallery, a refreshing addition to the Dublin art scene for a number of years, is currently in abeyance, in search of a new premises.
Two of the Eurojet artists are with the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, and another, Stephen Brandes, has shown there in the past, all of which is quite a compliment to the gallery.
Brandes is an example of an artist who has re-thought his work from the ground up. One of the outstanding exhibitors at this year's NCAD MA show, Brandes made a series of drawings and paintings inspired by the experience of exploring his own family history, retracing his grandmother's journey from Romania to Ireland - a journey with obvious contemporary resonance.
His images are schematic, map-like and anecdotal, and demonstrate a knowledge of modern art history and a determination to imbue it with personal, individual concerns. They are incidentally reminiscent of the late work of Philip Guston in their cartoonish informality. As with Guston, it suits Brandes as a pictorial strategy precisely because it allows him to introduce an enormous range of observations and feelings, things that would otherwise be frozen out by pure formalism or representational convention.
Amy O'Riordan, the youngest artist in the show, is straightforwardly a photographic artist. She deals with an area that has and continues to be widely explored by many contemporaries, but O'Riordan does so with exceptional boldness and breadth - and she has a terrific eye for an image. Rather than dogmatically limiting the meanings of her images by, for example, essentially illustrating a thesis on the objectification of women and reversing the male gaze, she seems to be genuinely exploring.
Perhaps a good starting point with her work is to say that she is fascinated by the way young women find themselves at the centre of a network of gazes. They look and are looked at, they are the subject of the gaze, but they also put themselves in the position of those who "see" them (O'Riordan repeatedly depicts young women looking through photographic lenses of one kind or another). She is also curious about the ways women look at men. It sounds a bit dry described in these terms, but her work is anything but. Her images delight in visual detail, in the allure of shoes and accessories, for example, their colour and texture.
While Oliver Comerford is a painter, it is difficult to imagine his paintings without photography and cinema. Not only do they draw on the optical effects of the mechanical lens (the ragged smear of light on a time exposure, the selective depth of field) but they also refer to the narrative conventions of road movies and cinema generally.
The paintings depict transience, the last ebbing of daylight, impersonal rural surroundings such as forestry plantations, isolated signs of life. Collectively they describe a bleakly beautiful physical and emotional terrain, an in-between, deserted space onto which we can project pictures of loss and absence. It is elegiac, but not sentimental. It's a tough place, but there is something that we want there.
Vanessa O'Reilly's work addresses cinema in a more quizzical way. Working directly onto the wall, she makes dense, rhythmically patterned drawings taken from individual frames of feature films. In effect we find ourselves faced with a ghostly impression, a residue of an image that was once so forceful and immediate on the screen. The harsh glare of the electric lamps that she incorporates tend to bleach out the image even further, lending them a strangely dreamlike, distant quality.
Amanda Coogan has established herself as a focused, deadpan performer. Apart from a core of stalwarts, Irish performance artists, particularly younger ones, have been few in number, though last year's performance art fest at IMMA may have spurred a revival.
Against this background Coogan is a remarkably poised and assured presence who has gone straight to the heart of the tradition in Europe, works to an exacting standard, and also addresses herself to the Irish cultural context. Blonde and blue-eyed, she uses her own appearance to explore an iconography of femininity that encompasses both Madonnas - that is, the biblical figure and the pop star. Her Revolution is a music video-style piece in which, wearing a low-cut white jacket, Coogan dances to Gil Scott-Heron's acerbic The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. So far, so Madonna, but the song is politically abrasive, Coogan's movements are angular and violent, and it looks as if she is signing - signing, not singing - some of the lyrics, which contradicts the seductive aspects of the genre.
Paul Nugent's calm paintings are a lure for the eye. Just as we adjust to a contemplation of their even, atmospheric surfaces, they disturb us with hints of images. Ambiguous details coalesce out of the colour like figures in a fog. Each painting is a portrait figure, but not simply that. Collectively they make up The Franciscan Series and each figure is identically posed in Franciscan habit. Prior to this came The Carmelite Series.
One obvious line of interpretation is that Nugent is both evoking and undercutting the notion of the spiritual in abstract art. Yet he is not being ironic or sarcastic in his use of religious imagery. Rather, his gravitation towards contemplative orders, vocational conviction and humility implies an underlying interest in what it might be that we look for - and what we find - in art.
Eurojet Futures 2002 is at the RHA, 15 Ely Place, Dublin until August 23rd (01-6612558)