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c100: Summer 2002 / C100 Review: Billy Foley C100 Review: Billy Foley Cork: Billy Foley at the Fenton Gallery In the mid-1980s, the steamrolling reaction against Minimalism assumed a new intensity, kindled mostly by young painters and so powered by a youthful love of bold gesture, liberated brushwork, heroic scale, mythic content, and rebellious figuration that critics immediately dubbed it Neo-Expressionism. The excitement generated by the German (Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, Sigmar Polk) and Italian (Mimmo Paladino, Domenico Bianchi, Enzo Cucchi) painters alike, produced an aggressive enduring embrace of every possibility - metaphor, allegory and narrative, surfaces energized by conscious and unconscious acts. Whether the subjective nature of Neo-Expressionism springs from the conscious or unconscious, whether it concentrates on emotion, or whether it consists of an analogical aspiration, it is an expression of the inner personality. It is intertwined, however, with subject-matter derived from science, philosophical or moral convictions, and sensory experience. The latter is filtered, as it were, through the first two. On the basis of an avalanche of evidence too voluminous to cite here, Neo-Expressionism must be regarded as a rejection of programmatic neo-objectivism as well as literalism, and a move towards a newly conceived connection between art and life. An examination of Billy Foley's drawings and paintings - currently on show at the Fenton Gallery - reveal that he has embraced many of the above concepts over the past ten years. A graduate of the Crawford College of Art and Design, his works highlight what Prof. Achille Bonito Oliva (Rome University) has defined as an "internal dualism": between a controlled, or intellectual freedom on the one hand, and improvisation and accident on the other. In this way clarity becomes one side of a polarity or, better, an axis, around which movement, freedom, vagueness, expression and a multitude of other experiences form a periphery. In conversation with Nuala Fenton, one of Ireland's most dynamic and professional gallerists, the artist states: "I don't need... literal subject matter. I like to see how someone thinks with form. That's important in art." Once a form-process-concept sýnthesis has been adopted, successive pictures belong to an evolving type, each work constituting a new phase in the growth of a changing idea which, like the proa of a vessel propelled from its stern, establishes new positions based on the past. All of Foley's paintings consist of a dialectic between the conscious (straight lines, designed shapes, weighted colour, abstract language) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes, automatism) resolved into a synthesis which differs as a whole from either. For Foley the brushstroke, in the Oriental sense, is "the symbol of the spirit," but his ideas also arise from his medium; and in Foley's aesthetic, spiritual qualities are as much a result of, as an impression upon, the medium. Thus canvas and pigment are not materials to be stamped with a preordained image, but active participants which condition the work's advance. Informal, risk-taking, assertive, and at its best inimitable, the artwork and concepts briefly described here reject the view that simulacrum (image or semblance) is all; the artist's philosophy denies that vigorous evocations and metaphorical renderings of reality are out of place today, or that mass production has put an end to the desire to communicate through original, material structures, leaving them a quaint anachronism Simply put, Foley's paintings bring us "back to matter," to a form of exploration and dialogue that has not, as yet, been fully played out. In this respect the critical nature of his concepts - physical and material - show considerable potential for the future. Dr. Michael Casey is an artist, curator and Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow. Billy Foley, Fenton Gallery, February/March 2002
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