Talk Bites: Eithne Jordan/Daniel Pitin; Andreas Golder/Damien Flood

Eithne Jordan + Daniel Pitin in conversation.
Making Familiar(4)
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin
4th September 2012

Damien Flood + Andreas Golder in conversation.

Making Familiar(5)

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin

11th September 2012

It was difficult to write following Eithne Jordan + Daniel Pitin’s conversation because things seemed resolved, it was done, dusted. There was a shared commitment to their way of augmenting painted space with their subtractive and additive means that said confidently, “I know.” It was reassuring. It was welcome. The elements of photography and painted space are not argumentative on their respective canvases, it is refined, or becoming refined. As Mark Swords observed following Andreas Golder + Damien Flood’s conversation, the opposition between refinement and awkwardness is a pattern that can be observed in the painting practices and conversations that have been part of Making Familiar so far. It’s nothing to do with maturity – Mary Ramsden’s paintings are the epitome of that journey of refinement.

Writing descriptively about painting seems superfluous at this point of Making Familiar. Walter Benjamin wrote that “Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it”[1]: but do we want to “command thought”? Is it not reductive to do so? Should we reduce the image into theoretical or descriptive verbal diarrhea, for no other reason than to offer the writer a space to wax lyrical?

Eithne Jordan
Paris Street 1, 2005
Oil on linen

Eithne Jordan

Winter X11 (2011)

Oil on linen

In a conversation with Robert Armstrong after hanging Eithne Jordan's work Winter X11, he referenced Alex Katz with regard to Jordan's compositional complexity, which is over-coated in flat simplicity. Shared agreement followed, but it was that flawed talking-whilst-thinking way of discussing the painted image directly in front of us, that my sentence above can only hint at. Like Making Familiar’s cumulative structure, it was what was said over the course of the last 5 weeks ( or 8 months of planning this exhibition) that armed the lining of Robert’s observation. Perhaps he only said "Alex Katz" and no more, and I knew what he meant.

Daniel Pitin

Bauhaus (2012)

Oil, acrylic, candle smoke and glued paper

Daniel Pitin
Dance Floor (2012)
Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas

The same can be said of a conversation that was had with Daniel Pitin, following the official conversation with the artist in the gallery. Politics and art came up at the dinner table. It was offset by a question posed in the gallery by the Czech Ambassador to Ireland Tomas Kafka, that pointed a finger at Daniel being a late child of communism. But it was the artist's aversion to such political agency at the dinner table that said so much more than his outward denial or polite agreement in the gallery. Maybe it was a case that being born late into such a regime allows Daniel to be objective about his position as an artist – a painter who desires to activate space with paint, not to paint the pangs of history. As Jacques Rancière observes: aesthetics and politics are intrinsically tied to art without being predetermined.

"Andreas Golder's paintings look like the covers of death metal albums: Damien Flood's paintings are death metal." (Alan Butler, post-conversation at TBG+S)

If you consider Damien Flood + Andreas Golder's shared music taste, Alan Butler's metaphor is perfectly poised as both criticism and compliment; depending on whether you want to be an artist that approximates The Thing, or an artist that makes The Thing itself. Note: I am defining The Thing as something that is easily verbalised but almost impossible to visualise, such as a feeling, mood etc. The metaphor of death metal can be stretched even further when you consider the genre of music that we are talking about ("genre" sounding pompous when equated with death metal). Death metal is not exactly the same as Peter Cushing rolling verbs off his clipped British tongue – death metal looks like Andreas Golder's tongue twister of a painting Kuss (2011) – a “nastier” version of Gustav Klimt The Kiss (1908) – and  feels like Flood's headbanger mound in Fur(2012).  

Andreas Golder

Kuss (2011)

Oil on Canvas

Damien Flood

Fur (2012)

Oil on canvas

Previously I spoke of the subject vs object in Diana Copperwhite and Vicky Wright's paintings, but The Thing is something that has only emerged during the conversation with Eithne Jordan + Daniel Pitin (in relation to the feeling or mood of a work of art), and during Damien Flood + Andreas Golder’s conversation, whereby The Thing became the avoidance of the subject, because the subject – as articulated through language – is a poor cousin of what is being said (or not said) on the canvas.  

Andreas Golder
Illustration für J. P. Sartre (2011)
Oil on Canvas


The Thing is difficult to extricate from the paintings of Andreas Golder + Damien Flood, but it’s there, hiding beneath the paint in Damien’s work, and behind the authorial denial in Andreas’ paintings.

Andreas Golder’s two larger paintings in the gallery Kuss and Illustration für J. P. Sartre have 3 steps to ‘refinement’: prepare canvas with thick gesso; coat with black glossy layer of oil paint; apply a gestural impasto layer of pink and red to illustrate a scene or thing. As he said during the gallery conversation, the reflective surface gives enough information that there is no need to overcomplicate things in the gestural passages. The impact of his paintings are instantaneous, helped along with his fetishistic use of material. Linseed oil flows over the edges of the unprimed canvas. Choppy black crusts of paint reach beyond the border of the paint stretcher. Cynically, his paint application is perfect for the art market conveyor belt (I don’t think he would disagree), and have enough impact to hold the collector’s attention for the check book to be unfolded. But there is more to the work than surface and being obligated to the gallery and art market. I fell in love with them as soon as we opened the wooden crate in the gallery; time will tell if it was a one night stand...

But Andreas doesn’t want to be “analysed.” When the artist responded to my “subversive” reading of his work as my projected desire, and nothing to do with him, there is sense that he is playing the Gerhard Richter ‘debunking’ card, whereby the artist deflates the verbal bombast that painting might potentially produce by ‘admitting’ that painting is “pure stupidity,” or, “I do it because I have to pay the rent.” It’s superior posturing from a false self-effacing position. These are all defense mechanisms to extricate the author from the responsibility of their conceived imagery. But I have to admit, when painters do talk about what is behind the paint, I am usually disappointed. 

Damien Flood

Breath (2012)

Oil on Canvas

Following the conversation with Andreas + Damien, Fine Art student Chris Collins asked about the necessity to make a painting ‘work’ on the part of the artist – that ‘failure’ cannot be considered. This is something that has been remarked upon throughout the Making Familiar conversations – paintings being discarded, worked over, or serialised in scale or medium until they ‘work’. In the case of Damien’s paintings, which are slow-burners rather than impact pieces, there is an constant challenging of his own aesthetic taste and what he presumes will be the viewer’s taste. In contrast to the calm surface of Andreas’ paintings, Damien’s works are agitated. I can imagine Van Gogh pausing for some time to rub his scalp in front of them. They are relentlessly optimistic. There is a love of paint and what paint can and cannot do. His paintings are the seeds of ambition – seeds that are blessed with a thyroid problem. His painted images are not cellular, but granular, and aesthetically stubborn.

Responding to Chris Collins’ question regarding the artist's pressure to make paintings that work: of course, it is the artist’s choice and responsibility to choose a painting that he/she will bravely reveal to the gallerist, and then the public to judge. It is also the artist’s responsibility to commit to drop the paint brushes and move sideways to the next canvas. However, there should be an element of wavering insecurity in what the artist perceives as a successful work. Perhaps, overtime, artists begin to solve the visual conundrum of the viewer, gallerist, and collector’s aesthetic taste in their immediate circle. But there is always a tinge of visual rebellion in the work of represented painters such as Eithne, Daniel, Damien and Andreas, which their solo shows for their respective galleries have revealed over the years. There seems to be a shared understanding between gallerist and artist that aesthetic taste needs to be continually challenged, if not, the artist will end up seeing his/her signature looking back at them in the mirror: that’s a creative cul de sac if ever I’d seen one. JAMES MERRIGAN



[1] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, (Trans.)Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979, p. 66.

A Mine F***d, A Mind F**K: Diana Copperwhite + Vicky Wright

Making Familiar Conversation(3)

with Diana Copperwhite + Vicky Wright

28st September, 2012

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios Dublin

"In the art-work content and form are one: meaning...In documents the subject matter is wholly dominant" Walter Benjamin[1]

The day before the third installment of the Making Familiar conversations – a live process that offsets each successive weekly rotation of paired painting practices at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) – I felt a need for reflection. There is something counter to the nature of painting as a reflective art practice that the Making Familiar curatorial goes against. As curators, we have set in motion an engine of discourse that has no STOP button: I am excited, but afraid of this fast-forward momentum forced onto painting.

Vicky Wright

Guardian LI (2011)

Oil on panel

Diana Copperwhite (2012)

Oil on Canvas

This effort to catch up on, or not forget one’s continually arising questions, occurred when hanging the works of Diana Copperwhite and Vicky Wright; especially during and after their conversation the following day in the gallery, when stark oppositions between the subject and object of their art practices came out to play on the gallery walls, and via their responses to questions posed by myself and Robert Armstrong. These implicit oppositions had nothing to do with the explicit visual oppositions in their use of colour, handling of paint, scale of work; but everything to do with the disappearing, or becoming, subject of their paintings. The question that I am left with is concerned with the subject of painting (the philosophical, political, social, biographical underpinning) being overpowered by the object of painting practice(materiality), and vice versa? 

Vicky Wright 

Guardian XLIII (2010)

Oil on panel

Diana Copperwhite (2012)

Oil on Canvas

A question posed by Slavka Sverakova via email also challenged the ethos of the Making Familiar conversations: “What of tacitur artists? Those who are shy, unable, unwilling, temperamentally not suited, distrustful of words as opposed to mute poetry, of skids of meaning in verbal translation of the tactile, visual, sensual...etc.”  

Slavka’s question brought me right back to the opposition between the object and subject of painting practice, especially within the context of the Making Familiar conversations. What of those artists who paint objects, not subjects. Of course, there is always a subject, but for the painter who puts the materiality and its ‘face-value’ ahead of an intention to translate some verbal insight to the viewer, can and should the object biased painter converse at all? Or is the materiality of paint the primary reason why artists paint? Is the subject a side-effect of the knowledge economy? And how does painting negotiate an art world that favours the subject?  

The object vs the subject in Copperwhite and Wright's paintings suggest shared concerns to do with the legibility of the painted image. In Wright's work, jumbles of forms fight for realisation, or, in Copperwhite's case, figuration is obscured, like a child wiping a mess from its face. 

Vicky Wright

Pacifist Virgin II (2012)

Oil on panel

200 x 120 cm

Vicky Wright

Pacifist Virgin II (2012)(DETAIL)

Oil on panel

Wright’s mention of Jean–Francois Lyotard’s Libdinal Economy during the Making Familiar conversation – an unusually multi-stylistic philosophical text – gives a key to her interest in the underbelly of society. The first chapter of Lyotard’s Libdinal Economy entitled ‘The Great Ephemeral Skin’, opens with an order to the reader: “Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces.”[2] With cold surgical calculation and pychoanalytical navel-gazing, Lyotard’s words undress the body as a way to unmask its desires. Surgery and desire are at the heart of Wright’s paintings – the artist admitted that she sometimes lies the painting support horizontally on the studio floor, digging out an image rather than vertically brushing the surface and layers of paint. As Robert Armstrong observed during the conversation with the artist, Wright’s methodology is “quite neat and controlled.”

Wright's object – with regard to the repeated use of a predetermined framed plywood support on which she paints – suggests the subject of the frame/framing is a determining factor of the rigid trajectory of the image. However, this rigidity loosens when the totem forms leak onto the frame.

Throw the term 'abjection' into the painted mix (with a psychoanalytical shovel), and Copperwhite’s paintings become seductive objects; sirens of colour and texture. Wright’s paintings on the other hand signify the remains of societal waste, representing a mine field with regard to the object of painting, and a mind fuck in regard to the painted subject.

Diana Copperwhite (2012)

Oil on Canvas

Diana Copperwhite (2012)(DETAIL)

Oil on Canvas

The abject, as Julia Kristeva would see it, is the covered-over waste of society: the human sewerage outlet that hides behind a craggy shore that leads to the ‘golden beach’ of civilisation. But although hidden and at a safe distance from capitalism, the abject has the potential to overthrow governments and religious doctrine, if, and when, uncovered. Wright mentions the recent London riots as a visual reference, a time when the abject literally spilt onto the streets.

Copperwhite’s repeated motif is a spectrum glimmer – the refracted light that bounces off a compact disc or other reflective surface. Although a group of people can experience such light anomalies (as was the case when a rainbow of colour shot across a wall in the gallery just before the conversation with the two artists), your point of view determines the form that the rainbow bands take. 

Copperwhite either blots out a portrait; chases the contour of a figure; or folds these glimmers into a figure: a visual partner to Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the baroque Fold.[3] In this subjective sense, abjection for Copperwhite is not a subject, but an object – the object of paint as material. It is usually the case with painting practice that the subject and object fight for relevance, but one invariably overrides the other. JAMES MERRIGAN

Notes
[1] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, (Trans.)Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979, p. 66.
[2] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, Continuum, 2004, p.1.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Continuum, 2006.

Don’t Say Sublime: Mark Joyce and Mary Ramsden

Making Familiar Conversation(2)

with Mark Joyce

21st September, 2012

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios Dublin

“I propose a moratorium on the word[sublime]: let’s say what we admire in art and science, but let’s say it directly, using words that are fresh and exact.” 

James Elkins[1]

If metaphor wasn’t hardwired into one's reception of the abstracted image, Mark Joyce and Mary Ramsden's paintings could be comfortably termed pure abstraction, or pure presence - the defining measure of the sublime. But our reliance on metaphor to make aesthetic judgments, and the agency of comparison and history to deal with a painting that you are presently looking at, offers the medium no respite from such tropes of convenience. Jean-Luc Nancy writes: "In the beautiful and in the sublime - which are neither things nor qualities of objects but judgments - and more precisely, aesthetic judgments.”[2]

Mark Joyce

The Edge of Light (2012)

acrylic on panel

Mary Ramsden

Untitled

oil on canvas

Painting in general has never shed itself of its inherited history, so terms such as the sublime and the beautiful have tagged along since Romanticism. Criticisms pitched at the sublime include the influx of personal subjectivities of the writer into the fold of writing. Furthermore, the sublime invites verbal flights of fancy and an escape from theory and critical thought, as the writer gets lost in the daisy field of the literary. However, as Mark Joyce observed during the Making Familiar(2) conversation with the artist at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios on 21st August 2012, art writers feel compelled to write on painting out of pleasure. The potential for verbal insights is richest when philosophers and poets write around painting. What else is left to talk or write about with regard to painting – surely not just surface?

Although James Elkins opines via two French philosophers that the sublime is the "central problem of representation itself"(Nancy), or the "crux of modern painting"(Jean-Francois Lyotard[3], my quandary is, I have always equated the term sublime to Mark Joyce’s paintings. I know now that the artist is well aware to thread carefully around such a term, as he said during the conversation, “I am fine with beautiful, but sublime..?” The mere mention of sublime regarding painting in general does suggest what the analytical philosopher Paul Crowther describes as "coloristic painterliness,"[4] but only if you reduce the sublime to J.M.W. Turner's painted sunsets.

Since Joyce's return to painting in 2003, after a photographic-turn, his skirmishes with colour and light have went from cold experimentation to warm discovery. Small in size, his earlier paintings evoke those secondary school moments when one is waiting for the litmus paper to turn red or blue; the subjects of colour, light, and music, registering as high coloured horizontal strips (or zips), wavy lines, and less ordered daubs of paint.

Up to recently, I imagined Joyce, like Piet Mondrian, in a spotless lab coat and white tiled laboratory, with jazz playing low in the background: the only spillage of paint found in the grout between the tiles. Why so? Just his unwavering modernist commitment to painting light and colour, like a scientist with a brain itch. Joyce's best paintings from 2003 up to, but not including, his recent solo show at Green on Red gallery Dublin in 2012, have been when his familiar use of horizontal bands of colour weren't so straight, and overlap; paintings that create doubt. His current paintings have closed the gap between his earlier coy experimentations to his current focus on pictorial space. In these more resolved works, Joyce is tip-toeing away from the exciting, but desperate bit-parts of his earlier painting series, to make works that retain the previous fractal debris, but are sturdily ‘framed’ and individually committed to being one full image in their own right. 

But, it's not his use of full colour that produces this affect, but his consistent ground of white beneath. My subjective imagining of the sublime is not colourful or tropical, but white, black, North. The sublime lacks detail, no edge, semi-opaque.

Mark Joyce 

Shutter (2012)

acrylic on panel

Mary Ramsden

Untitled

oil on canvas

Joyce's current paintings, originally shown at Green on Red earlier in 2012 under the appropriately reductive title of 'New Works', are exposures of the sublime. In The Edge Of Light (2012), swats of paint, or torch beams, crisscross the picture plane in unapologetic primary colour. The colour is applied flat and sharp; nuance captured through greys and some scrapped back shots of paint/light. The most arresting work is Shutter, 2012, where one point-perspective shards of colour miss the ‘point’, while beneath, a haze of painted forms invites the viewer beyond the violent tips of colour. What we shouldn’t mention here is heaven and earth with regard to the sublime, although Corregio’s painted Baroque ceilings do come to mind when looking at Shutter: "The imagination is thus destined for the beyond of the image."[5] 

As is the case with most forty-something painters, Mark Joyce’s painting practice can be judged and reflected upon through the work he has produced over the last 20 years. Mary Ramsden’s practice is fresh out of the oven, but, as her paintings lack explicit expressionist tendencies or figurative elements, her works bespeak a maturity well beyond her years as an artist. 

What bridges Mark Joyce’s paintings to Mary Ramsden’s is Joyce’s answer to my question regarding the sublime while in conversation with the artist, in which Joyce shared an insight into Edmund Burke’s origins of the term “sublime,” aptly provoked from a Dublin hotel room overlooking the River Liffey, which broke its banks in 1746. Burke wrote in a letter following the event: “that state of the soul, in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror[and]the mind is so infinitely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other...”[6]

(Left)Luc Tuymans 

Body (1990)

oil on canvas

(Right) Mary Ramsden

Untitled 

oil in canvas

Mary Ramsden’s spread-eagled uniform shapes are always at the limit of breaking the border of the canvas, sometimes spilling over, and always leaving a glimpse or two of an underpainting. Ramsden’s paintings are outy bellybuttons to Joyce’s innys. The latter gives us caverns of sharp perspectives, the former a protective shell of buttery colour. In some ways Joyce’s work does not only play with light and colour, but also space, explicitly so in his new works. Whilst Ramden’s works avoid space, representing the nothing of the sublime[7], but paradoxically, wholly figurative; as if we are up close to a figure – too close – to make out its shape, reminiscent of Luc Tuymans’ Body (1990).

"Stretched to the limit, the limit (the contour of the figure) is stretched to the breaking point, as one says, and it in fact does break, dividing itself in the instant between two borders, the border of the figure and it's unlimiting unbordering. Sublime presentation is this feeling of this striving at the instant of rupture, the imagination still for an instant sensible to itself although no longer itself, in extreme tension and distension (‘overflowing’ or ‘abyss’)” (Jean-Luc Nancy)[8]

Mary Ramsden

Making Familiar

Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Dublin

August, 2012

(Left)Mark Joyce, (Right) Mary Ramsden

Making Familiar

Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Dublin

August, 2012

We as viewers invariably use metaphor and comparison to shrink the artwork into the knowable and graspable: this is especially true of painting. Hegel describes our use of such tropes as “shrinkage,” a way of dealing with big ideas or events that make us stutter when there are no words forthcoming: a term like ‘sublime’ sorts out this subjective mess, just as the term schizophrenia bracketed unspecific mental illnesses in 1960s America. James Elkins is eager to point out in his essay ‘Against the Sublime’ that, although the sublime “is in the lexicon of contemporary art discourse” it should be abandoned, as “it takes people away from the real world of politics and society, of meaning and narrative, of culture and value.”  His solution: “find synonyms to express what they mean, and those synonyms are apt to be more telling, and more useful, than the word sublime.”[9]

Elkins’ dissatisfaction with the term stems from its contemporary misuse; its being out-of-date, its forgotten history when it is used; its theological agency; or its ignorance of poststructuralism. Bottom line, the term is a good mop for excess!

But, in a time when contemporary modes of art are continually abandoning, or forgetting, their ever-shortening histories, the sublime has never abandoned painting (or painting the sublime), which is the aesthetic medium par excellence – one of many reasons that explains painting’s isolation from contemporary art discourse, as it never benefitted from the cushion of post-minimalist or socio-political theory that has been built up around other art since the 1960s. What painting did get by way of theory was grand philosophical narrative that included Lyotard’s sublime articulations of Barnett Newman; Deleuze’s projection of the baser animal instincts onto Francis Bacon’s painted deformations; and Derrida’s 400 page tome The Truth in Painting, which opens with the proclamation: “I am interested in the idiom in painting” (read   the ‘proclamation’ closer and you will see where Derrida is going, or not going ... I gave up on following after 100 pages).

However, the sheer scale of Derrida’s verbal outpouring validates the painted subject as a grand producer of language, and not just a habit, a quirk, that is difficult to swat away. JAMES MERRIGAN

Notes

[1] From James Elkins, 'Against the Sublime', 2009, [http://www.jameselkins.com/]

[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, 'The Sublime Offering', in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, Essays by Jean-Francois Courtine, Michel Deguy, Eliane Escoubas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacob Rogozinski, State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 30.

[3] James Elkins, op.cit.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jean-Luc Nancy, op.cit., p. 43.

[6] Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, University Of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[7] Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford paperbacks, 2008.p. 95.

[8] Jean-Luc Nancy, op.cit. p.  45-46.

[9] James Elkins, op.cit.

Spanners and Gems: Mark Swords & Paul Doran

'Making Familiar' conversation with Mark Swords and Paul Doran

14th September, 2012

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios Dublin.

"Collage makes poetry with the prosaic fragments of dailiness."

                                                                                                                             Donald Kuspit[1]

It maybe misleading to use the term "collage" when referring to Paul Doran and Mark Swords' paintings (not to mention the Braque and Picasso association), but perhaps collage is a more fitting way to describe their shared process of inviting unexpected elements into the predetermined materiality of painting. The art critic Donald Kuspit describes "collage" as a "flimsily made"..."deliberately flawed"..."ramshackle"... "helter skelter" looking “accident.”[2] He follows this up with his usual psychodynamic superiority over the art object: "The collage replaces privilege with equivalence, definitions of artistic being with artistic becoming, unity with energy."[3] 

Unlike the limiting oppositions of abstraction vs representation, collage is bi-curious; a formal deviant; a parasite; a visual expression of the fraught relationship between image and word. NO FRAME IS REQUIRED! And if a frame is considered in the mix, it is usually swallowed up by the painted image: think Howard Hodgkin’s paint-splattered frames. Failing that, the frame is dis(figured) by the artist. 

Paul Doran, Untitled (2008-2012), oil on linen over board, handmade acrylic painted frame.

Mark Swords, In a Cheddar Cave (2009), Carpet fibre and glue.

Dis(figurement) is Paul Doran's game. The backs of his current paintings are a ramshackle mess. They look and feel like they were pieced together from off-cuts found outside the tidy workshop of an overly particular carpenter. It doesn't get much neater on the front, where thumbnail shaped pieces of hardboard and plywood are flaked into an admixture of acrylic and shredded drawings. (This "thumbnail" description originates from the first day I met Paul, when he had blood under one thumbnail  - the mark of a hammer blow from some intentionally awkward construction I bet.)

Paul Doran, Cove, wood, acrylic paint, fabric, and linen, 2012.

Mark Swords, Ellipse, acrylic, hessian, and wood on canvas, 2012.

In contrast to Doran, being 'particular' is Mark Swords' game. We could assume that Swords is the "overly particular carpenter," who inhabits the tidy workshop from which Doran salvages the discarded waste from outside. This opposition between ‘inside’ (Swords) and ‘outside’(Doran) is the mitosis that is needed to separate the two artists. Swords’ works remind one of the Post-Impressionist interiors of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard – self-proclaimed prophets (Les Nabis) of modernity. His assemblages are the result of patience and persistence and dexterity. Doran’s objects suggest Paul Cézanne, in which the sense of touch equals sight. Both artists make works that are hard-earned, for the viewer and the artist.

Mark Swords,  Pattern no. 2 (2009), acrylic on linen.

Paul Doran, Building castles in the sky (2012), wood, acrylic paint, gesso, paper, linen and screws. 

Although both artists invite chance, Swords is a considered faith in the unforeseeable (“Prophet” maybe stretching it), whereas Doran's material meddling looks like a stick of dynamite was shoved into Pandora's Box. Doran is waiting to be surprised - inviting that tension between chance and intent to beget a work that is perpetually becoming. His art objects are demolished constructions – a continually salvaged process rather than recycled style.

Paul Doran, It's not easy to be me (2009-2012),  wood, acrylic paint, linen, fabric and pencil.

Mark Swords, Four Ties 2012, fabric and thread.

Both of their practices are cursed (or blessed) by contradiction: formal conundrums of  beauty and the beast. Swords' objects are usually well-dressed, while Doran’s have just got out of bed...and on the wrong side. His painting It’s not easy to be me looks like a handful of doilies were pasted together  – a coagulated mess from last night's food fight. Paired with Swords’ dapper Four Ties 2012, we get a sense of their contrasting sensibilities. Saying that, Swords’ Everything is connected (See Below) seems like the painting stretcher is wearing the wrong size canvas, as ‘staples’ wander from the edges to the painting proper. These conundrums and contradictions are made visible in how both artists are placed side-by-side at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. What we get from Doran and Swords is a mixed bag of spanners and gems. 

Mark Swords, Everything is connected (2012), oil on canvas.

Mark Swords, Veil (2012), oil on gessoed linen panel.

Swords’ intense jungle of curved, fan-shaped forms (See above: Veil), is one of the most vibrant and intense works in the gallery, in which light and colour compete for common ground. The key to this work is a band of underpainting that is left exposed on the right edge. It’s un(finished). It is becoming. His other painting entitled Forgery is the real  ‘spanner’ in the works: however well the composition holds the painting together, the ‘badly’ mixed primary colours revisit Picasso’s assertion that the creche art class is where art begins, and ends.

Paul Doran, Untitled (2006-2011), oil on linen over board.

In the case of Doran, his history with oil paint is background noise to his new acrylics. His earlier oil paintings are layered fat with thick whips of paint like Mud Cake – a collector’s confectionary (See above: Untitled 2006-2011). In other instances he moves oils like water, with the effortless nonchalance of a janitor scooping the scum to the edges of the swimming pool (See second image from top: Untitled 2008-2012). Just beside, and perpendicular to this work by Doran, Swords gives us some of the same stalagmite/stalactite forms, but in carpet fibre (In a Cheddar Cave 2009): an uncanny coincidence or shared sensibility?

Paul Doran, A Guston cloud hangs over my head (2010), wood acrylic paint, linen and mirror plates.

Since 2009, Doran has worked solely in acrylic. The first acrylics look like they want to grow up to become oil paints. The paintings that immediately followed the switch from oils to acrylics are rich, not primary (See above: A Guston cloud hangs over my head). His more recent acrylics are less self-conscious, removed from oil painting’s ambition. 

Just after hanging Doran and Swords' work at TBG&S, Robert Armstrong pulled out a  'bottom line' quote by Robert Hughes, from the hundreds of quotations that surfaced on the internet following the sad news of the art critic's death on August 6th 2012. The quote says so much about art, but reads like it was written for Doran and Swords: "In art there is no progress, just fluctuations in intensity”.

In a time when contemporary art is afraid of its human reflection, painting offers a mirror. What can be gained from looking and understanding the relationship between Doran and Swords and their works, is a belief that "fluctuations of intensity" is progress, and can only be achieved through the shared synergy of verbal and visual insights. JAMES MERRIGAN

Notes

[1] Donald Kuspit essay ‘Collage: The Organizing Principal of Art in the Age of Relativity of Art’ (1983), from Donald Kuspit’s collection of texts The New Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Da Capo Press, New York, 1993,  p. 512.

[2] Ibid. p. 519.

[3] Ibid. p. 508.