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
sınthesis 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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Top
to bottom: Billy
Foley: 01.03.2001, 2001, oil paint, charcoal
on canvas, 152 x 228cm; 17.03.2001, 2001,
oil paint, charcoal on canvas; No. 5,charcoal
and conté crayon on paper, 152 x 228cm; courtesy
Fenton Gallery
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Article
reproduced from CIRCA 100, Summer
2002, pp.84-85.
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