Inspired by the human figure

One consistent theme runs through all of Hughie O’Donoghue’s work at Imma, and even the artist himself has been surprised by some of the results

IF YOU HAD to pick one consistent theme that runs through virtually all of the work in Hughie O’Donoghue’s exhibition at Imma, you would more than likely settle, as he does himself, on the human figure. “It does link everything together,” he observes. “And to me, some of the relationships are surprising, the way one thing springs out of another, even when there’s a big gap in time between them.” The earliest work on view dates from 1996, the most recent is barely dry.

There are 27 pieces in the show, all physically substantial, many monumental. Seven are drawn from a donation of some 39 works to Imma, the gift of an American collector, facilitated by the American Ireland Fund. Hughie O'Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American Ireland Fund Donationmarks that generous gift.

An individual human presence is a strikingly fixed, unwavering constant throughout series after series of drawings, prints and paintings. And in every case any struggle that goes on in the work – and there is always a struggle – has to do with the effort to recover or preserve this presence, which seems fugitive, fragile, transient, fading. It is forever on the verge of being lost or in the process of tenuous recuperation or, a word that is particularly appropriate to the scoured, earthy surfaces of canvas and paint, paper and graphite, excavation. It is as if O’Donoghue physically excavates the subject from the ground of the painting or the drawing.

References to the earth abound in his work, from early paintings inspired by the archaeological discovery of the bodies of Iron Age sacrificial victims preserved in the peat bogs of Jutland, to the muddy quagmire that swallowed many thousands of lives during the Battle of the Somme (there in the two The Meaning of All Thingspaintings). For O'Donoghue the point is not an objective recounting of stories that happen to someone else, it is our own indelible connections to, our profound identification with these stories and people. The driving force, the moral imperative underlying each of his works in whatever medium, is our responsibility not to turn away, our duty to bear witness.

Pragmatically, in reality, we turn away every day, colluding by indifference in actions to which we would not put our names. That is the way the world works. An exemplary classical drama, and a key character for O’Donoghue would undoubtedly be Sophocles’s Antigone, who defied the state and fulfilled her duty in tending to the body of her slain brother Polynices. Antigone is, on one level, a perfect subject for the painter, and one could ask why he has not felt inclined to take on the story directly. In fact, the spirit of Antigone is implicit throughout his work, which prompts us, as viewers, into her role.

Back in 1986 Craig Baker, an American art collector, commissioned O'Donoghue to embark on a major series of works on the theme of the Passion of Christ, one of the central subjects in the Western Christian tradition, but one that had fallen out of artistic favour.

The commission arose in the context of conversations in and around churches containing some of the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, a time that represented a high point in religious art but also anticipated its inexorable decline. The erosion of the church’s power and patronage, the secularisation of art and the waning of religious belief all contributed, with few exceptions, to an impoverishment in the quality of the art commissioned for institutional religious settings.

Baker's commission eventually resulted in many years of work. Many of the pieces are paintings on a monumental scale, including what is perhaps the centrepiece and culmination of the series, Blue Crucifixion, reworked several times from 1993 and only completed in 2003. It's on view as part of the Imma exhibition and it is a magisterial piece of work. As Baker wrote when much of the Passionseries was originally exhibited in Ireland at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in 1999: "These are not religious artworks." That may sound perverse given the theme and genesis of O'Donoghue's Passion, but it makes sense when you seen the images themselves. While everything about them is concerned with embodiment, and perhaps bodily endurance, and while they certainly have to do with the human spirit, they are not overtly concerned with questions of divinity. This is not to say that they are irreligious, but the issue is left open.

What does come very much into play in the Passion, though, is the idea of memory and the tasks of remembering and bearing witness. Hence the related themes of love, duty, betrayal, loss and resurrection all acquire a resonance beyond any specific Biblical context. Many of the works were made during a time when the connection between art and human experience was obscured or denied by an apparently non- negotiable layer of irony. The endless play of signifiers replaced a responsibility to a notional reality. Needless to say, many artists, O'Donoghue among them, never accepted such a point of view and devoted themselves to finding routes back to a world of real and often troubled lives.

For O’Donoghue, the path to the real lay in the practice of bearing witness to his own immediate history. To, that is, the particular but also emblematic experiences of his parents and their extended families. Painstakingly, with slow, considered attention, he has followed the biographical trails left by his father and mother. They lived through what was the cataclysmic event of the 20th century, the second World War. His father’s perilous journeys through two campaigns, the first culminating in the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force through France, the second the bitter and costly advance through occupied Italy, with dangerous river crossings and the devastation of Monte Cassino, impose a human scale on the vast, inhuman machinations of history.

One of the virtues of the works dealing with his father's wartime experience is our constant awareness that we are talking not about some aberration but a continuous history, that the great achievements of civilisation are part of the same world as the worst excesses and atrocities. Disturbing correspondences along the way drove this point home: retracing his father's steps in 2001, O'Donoghue encountered the figure on the roof slab of the Tomb of the Divernear Naples, dating from about 480 BC, an image that eerily prefigured the chilling news photographs of people driven to jump from the burning Twin Towers on September 11th. His mother's family, meanwhile, led him to the remote, challenging landscapes of Erris in northwest Mayo, a region he has known and loved from childhood holidays, but one he is not at all sentimental about.

His paintings exploring the tight, almost destructive connection between land and people display an acute awareness of just how tough a place it was and, in certain respects, still is. He has also been led back into previous generations, to accounts of economic hardship and emigration, to the epochal loss of innocence represented by the first World War and to the distinctive uneasiness of the calm before the storm.

WHEN THE IDEA of the Imma exhibition was mooted, he quickly came around to the view that it should not focus exclusively on the Passion.To do so would suggest that the series, monumental though it is, was somehow different or exceptional in his oeuvre. As he became engaged in the Passion project in the late 1980s and began producing works in the 1990s – and some of those who observed his engagement were impressed by his absorption and commitment to the point of worrying about his well-being – he came to feel that it was not separate from the central concerns of the rest of his work. Even so, as he notes, many layers of interconnection have only become gradually apparent to him over time.

There are, for example, many examples of figures in an approximately cruciform shape in his paintings, mostly apart altogether from the Passionworks. "Obviously," he observes, "when people see that they think it can only be one thing. But in fact it's not."

He is always alert to what he is setting out to do in any particular painting, but the process itself is not open to continuous, conscious control. He has written in the past that, while he’s happy to say what a painting is about, he can’t vouch for its meaning: that emerges in the process of making the painting, over time, and is not calculated.

It happens that, he says: “You feel compelled to do something, but you don’t quite understand its significance at the time. That’s true even though I think I’m more analytical now about what I’m doing. With each picture you learn a bit more about what works and what doesn’t work. Most of the time it doesn’t work, of course.”

He says this standing before a painting called Fool's House II, a relatively busy composition juxtaposing the peaceful, prone figure of a young man who might be resting or dead, a rough, corrugated metal hut that resembles an upended boat, and a landscape. Set into the surface are what could be a wooden door, and a weathered wooden beam. It's complicated in terms of pictorial space and narrative possibilities. Completed in 2007, this picture is, he notes, like a storehouse of material which he is only now exploring. "I think more is going to come out of it. I've still things to discover about it."

Hughie O’Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Pieces from the American Ireland Fund Donationis at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Mar 3 to May 17, tel: 01-6129900