Opening Reception:
Guest Speaker: Conor McCloskey -
Hello everyone, first off, I am well aware my credentials for addressing you today are fairly scant, but I will explain how it has transpired and hopefully provide some sort of overview of today's exhibition.
On a cold day in January, I bumped into Paul and as a teacher I quickly realised he was a natural, not only due to his exceptional knowledge of the Irish art scene, but also his passionate belief in the artistic merit of a myriad of contemporary Irish artists. Paul demonstrates the only skill a good teacher needs to demonstrate, which is the power to communicate enthusiasm. It's also probably a great quality for someone who owns a contemporary art gallery as well.
It was Ezra Pound I quoted in relation to teaching and he is also responsible for the quote poetry is news that stays news. Surely the same is true of great fine art? So, if a chance encounter with Paul is the reason I'm talking to you, it's because he wanted to tell me about a recent exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy called Cover Versions, which examined the connection between Irish writers and the work of Irish artists. The exhibition displayed paintings of famous writers such as Brian Friel but also original artwork by Irish artists such as Basil Blackshaw who were commissioned to provide covers for Irish poetry volumes for poets such as Paul Muldoon.
And I think there is a profound reason for the close affiliation of great poets and fine artists, which explains the mutual respect and inspiration reflected in that Cover Versions exhibition. And nowhere is this more perfectly illustrated than by Seamus Heaney and the long-established personal and professional connections he forged with the lives and work of great contemporary Irish artists such as Edward McGuire, Derek Hill, and T. P. Flanagan. Flanagan's famous series of bog paintings were a rich source of inspiration to Heaney, finding their perfect poetic expression in Heaney's poetic equivalent Bogland:
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Flanagan was the dedicatee for this poem so his influence on the writing of the poem is indisputable. So, what explicitly connects the two genres? Well, both present a perfect visual representation of the same subject. One through exquisite choice of words; the other through equally exquisite application of paint. But the influence is even more profound, for just as T.P. Flanagan went on to make an extensive series of studies of Bogland, Heaney's poem proved the precursor to the great bog poems of his legendary 1975 volume North. So not only did Flanagan's studies influence Heaney's literal representation of the landscape they became the spur for a meditative series of poems which explicitly connected the on-going conflict in the north of Ireland with sacrificial rights and skirmishes in iron age Europe.
The Graubelle man is a bog body that was uncovered in 1952 from a peat bog near the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. The body is that of a man dating from the late 3rd century BC, during the early Germanic Iron Age. Based on the evidence of his wounds, he was most likely killed by having his throat slit. In Heaney's poem of the same name the descriptive power is sensational but so too are the connections with violence in the north in the period:
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan's foot
or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.
Who will say 'corpse'
to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?
And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus's.
I first saw his twisted face
in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,
but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
In the poem Punishment Heaney not only deftly and sympathetically describes the plight of an ancient German girl who was apparently sacrificed for adultery, but he explicitly connects her situation with the fate of young women tarred and feathered for fraternising with British soldiers in the early 1970s, and by the end of the poem even implicates an entire unspecified, though readily identifiable caste of people, including himself, for their cowardice at not speaking out against such atrocities:
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brains exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
By which point literature has moved beyond literal representation and acquired a distinctly abstract moral component.
So, how then is all this preamble relevant to the work of Robert Ryan, the artist whose exhibition/retrospective is being opened today? Well, first off, he is one of Ireland's leading contemporary painters, exhibited on 23 occasions by the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, alongside exhibitions at a host of prestigious venues throughout Ireland and further afield. And as with T. P. Flanagan's bog paintings he demonstrates a similarly well-established connection with the landscape which surrounds his ancestral home in Lough Gur, Co. Limerick. A deeply forged connection with a landscape unchanged over millennia. Secondly, his beautifully realised canvases manage to present a literal reality to the viewer, but with an abstract suggestive quality which is also a feature of great poetry. For his landscapes seem precisely realistic whilst at the same time mythic and slightly surrealistic. Due in part to the isolated, haunted-looking llama-like creatures which inhabit each of his paintings, providing a note of omen in these dreamlike canvases. Maybe Magic Realism, a genre of literature as well, is the perfect description of his art?
As with effective conceptual art, in Robert Ryan's work I feel we are being encouraged to project our own thoughts and experiences onto the canvas, leading to demanding questions which may never be answered:
- Are these landscapes completely idealised or precisely realistic?
- How can such painterly precision not be a reflection of reality?
- How can we feel they are entirely real when they are populated by mythical creatures?
- If idealistic, why do they feel so eerily familiar?
- If precisely realistic, why have we never gone there?
- Is this arcadian world contemporary or is meant to predate or maybe postdate human existence?
- Is it dawn or dusk. Is the sun rising or is it twilight?
And so on and so forth.
One of the greatest exponents of tragedy was the English prose writer Thomas Hardy. In his 1885 masterpiece the Mayor of Casterbridge, he achieved his main effect not merely by presenting the ruination of his chief protagonist, Michael Henchard, but by giving the poor man hope. At various points in the novel despite his innumerable mistakes he experiences a sense of obliviousness to fate, though the reader rightly suspects it is only doom deferred. There is something of that 'doom deferred' quality to Robert Ryan's canvases. There is a similarly ominous sense of life being precariously lived, reinforced by the darkening shadows and the gloomy chiaroscuro which predominates, and those morose-looking creatures who somehow add to the immense silence of the canvases. Or do they contribute a note of much-needed optimism. Are they a symbol of life persevering in an abandoned landscape? You will have to decide.
But in a sense who cares? Not knowing is a form of ecstasy, and these paintings are wonderful to look at - atmospheric and cathartic; calm yet premonitory - and I hope you too find yourself pleasantly lost in the timelessness of these exquisite and eternal canvases.
Influences on his work - or at artists for whom there is at least a sound basis for conjecture surely include:
- The gloomy classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain
- A painting of Robert's entitled Guardian from 2019 was reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's Romantic masterpiece, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, though there is less optimism in Robert's painting
- Rousseau whose disembodied lions and tigers were revealed in often dreamlike landscapes akin to Robert's allegorical creature
- Finally, at times there is something of the surreality of Dali and Robert's canvases are like the rural dreamlike equivalent to De Chirico's rectilinear urban nightmare scenes.
Robert Ryan is not gnomic when it comes to discussing his own work and has provided many valuable clues over the years to illustrate the secrets of his art.
'The aim is to create a neutralised world, in which everything is indistinct, free of man-made structures, or in fact anything that connects to reality or modern society.'
'The aim is to address big themes like the infinity of space, and time, solitude, vulnerability, fragility, and the cycle of life.'
When all is said and done it is often an immense stillness which resides at the centre of these works, reflective of a land preserved in time round his ancestral homeland in Lough Gur.
So, to the paintings in this current exhibition 'Crossings' which Paul has curated:
Take a look at the Turneresque the Storm, the Swimmer, the Island, one of his legendary creatures just about visible reminiscent of the rabbit in Turner's Rain, Steam & Speed.
The charcoal based Last Leaf at the top of the stairs has all the immediate impact of a Durer sketch.
What is immediately apparent is that there is a new luminosity in the optimism of the title of the Exhibition Crossings and associated paintings, as the mythical beasts now a family traverse a range of landscapes. There is a real sense of journey in these paintings of a Rubicon having been crossed to achieve a new stillness with titles such as Arrival indicative of this. But it is through light and colour that Robert Ryan really convinces us of a new optimism in his work. Even paintings such as Lands' End may represent a terminus but there is no sense of omen apparent, and Connacht has all the magisterial effect of strong colour as Van Gogh's Starry Night.
And the brilliance of his depiction of trees in this exhibition is worth commenting upon - worthy of Constable in painting The Straggler upstairs - alongside wonderful evocations of clouds. But there is the occasional gloomy landscape to enjoy as well in this exhibition. Upstairs those isolated creatures can be found in misty landscapes worthy of Corot in paintings such as Strays. So, it's hard to know what is next for Robert Ryan. More Magic Realism or maybe further forays into folklore? Either way it is likely the landscape of Lough Gur will remain at the heart of his work.
Guest Speaker:
Conor McCloskey.
20th May 2023.
