To judge by his work, pursued with cool rigour and intelligence and a degree of austerity, Charles Tyrrell is in many respects the model of an urban abstract painter. You might guess that he lived in London or Manhattan. In fact, since 1984 he has been based in one of the most remote corners of Ireland, close to Allihies village on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. The house where he and his wife, Sandy, and their daughters live is set high on a promontory on Cod's Head, perched over the Atlantic. It is a vertiginous landscape of violently folded rock and scant vegetation, beautiful but harsh, almost surreal in its extremity.
After moving there, though he continued to work, it was another six years before he managed to get around to building the studio in which he painted everything included in his exhibition Ten Years, which opens on Wednesday at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery. He tends to work in series, and the show includes works from the Borderland and Shadowline series, worth mentioning because they are two of the rare occasions when he has been inclined actually to put names to them. Generally, he has remarked, a title is a way of not calling pictures by their numbers in sequence.
Always, though, his paintings are underpinned by a strong, architectonic grid structure and simple geometric formulas, often based on diagonal and other regular subdivisions. Lately, following on from a small group of paintings made in 1995, Dream Field I-IV, the compositions have been liberated from the constraints of the grid into the freer space of the compositional field. All of which may sound a little forbidding, for Tyrrell's work is hard to describe adequately in words. With their meticulous surface textures and subtle, atmospheric colours, his paintings really need to be experienced at first hand.
He was born and grew up in a landscape that couldn't be more different from craggy, tempestuous Beara: the even, uninflected terrain of Trim, County Meath. After secondary school he went to Dublin to attend the National College of Art and Design. His time there as a student, from 1969 to 1974, coincided with a period of unrest and change within the college - throughout which, contemporaries recall, he remained strikingly self-possessed, hard working and quietly committed to his own artistic agenda. Though Dorothy Walker, noticing circular motifs in the early paintings, has suggested that the work of Patrick Scott was a formative influence, Tyrrell politely demurs. In fact, he says, he was looking further afield, to the Abstract Expressionists and Colour Field painters he'd seen while visiting the US. While he was still at college, he had his first one-person show at the Project Arts Centre. Then, and for his following show just a year later, he was making large-scale abstracts in which pigment, mostly acrylic, was soaked directly into the surface of the canvas. Even then, however, he was inclined to muddier, more atmospheric tones than the pure colour of American exemplars such as Morris Louis. In an interview with Brian Fallon, he remarked quite accurately that Louis had opened a door for him. It was a question of technical influence rather than any deep stylistic affinity.
Tyrrell's enduring painterly concerns were already evident in his simple geometric compositions in which the elements were held in tense equilibrium. He cites Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn as more sustained influences, appositely given his penchant for combining textural brushwork and hard-edged geometry. As he sums it up: "At the core of my work there is a constant battle between the order of the imposed geometrical structure and the demands of an emerging painting that might not wish to conform to this structure." Hence the invariably concentrated, closely argued nature of his work.
Apart from his own painting, he played an active role in artistic life, with an involvement in the Project Arts Centre's Visual Arts Committee and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. He also taught at Dun Laoghaire School of Art. In Dublin, his studio was a room in a Georgian house on Mountjoy Square at the time when the square was falling into a state of dereliction. Though Tyrrell is wary of acknowledging specific outside influences and content, the fabric of Dublin did enter into his work in a direct way. Noticing that St Peter's Church in Aungier Street was marked for demolition, he salvaged some superb timber from the structure. Some of this, together with more wood from a house demolished on Mountjoy Square, is incorporated in a sculptural series of painted wood pieces he produced in the early 1980s. The organic properties of the old wood, which bears numerous traces of its history, is played against strict geometric formats in the same way that the expressive brush-stroke relates to the grid in the paintings.
Equally, the environment on Beara affected his painting. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he seemed to make seasonal and atmospheric references in beautifully painted works dominated by a kind of centrifugal energy. As time went by, he slowly recovered control of the picture surface, so to speak, from these torrents of energy, working towards the delineation of a number of cryptic, graphic motifs. The tension in these pictures derives from the edgy reconciliation of two divergent pictorial strands, which threaten to pull each composition apart along a built in fault line. The title of one of these, Formal Talks indicates the structure and refers to peace talks in Northern Ireland. "The basic idea is this convergence of two different systems or worlds, meeting in this central, slightly mismatched image. Once I was painting them I began to see parallels in everything around us - marriage, the democratic political system, gender relations."
Recently he has become fascinated by the possibilities of painting on aluminium sheet. "It's a totally seductive material. It allows you to do things that just aren't possible on canvas." He exploits the smoothness of the surface to make some of his freest painting yet, in which sheets of colour seem to slide across the compositional space along invisible lines of force before becoming pinned into their eventual configuration. "The funny thing is," he observes, "I find I'm connecting with notions I worked with in the Borderland paintings. In a way you always end up back where you started." Or, as de Kooning put it: "You have to change to stay the same."
Charles Tyrrell: Ten Years is at the RHA Gallagher Gallery from November 15th until January 21st