C102 review

Sligo: Hughie O'Donoghue at Model Arts and Niland

Hughie O'Donoghue: Wrestlers (detail), 2000, oil on linen; courtesy Model Arts and Niland Gallery

The recently refurbished Model Arts Centre and Niland Gallery provided the venue for Hughie O'Donoghue -Ten Years. As is partially apparent from the title, the work showcased is drawn from approximately a decade since his first exhibition in Ireland. Of particular note is the fact that most of the work included herein has not been exhibited before in this country. Though O'Donoghue describes the show as "essentially a painting exhibition," the work represents, at times, a collage of print, paint and, in one instance, sculpture. O'Donoghue himself relates that the works within the exhibition all "to some extent use memory as a motif." The twin spectres of time and mortality certainly loom large throughout the show.

With certain pieces, photographs are printed onto the canvas and then overpainted. The selected photographs appear to be from the thirties or forties and consequently are already indicative of a vanished period. The gestured sweep of the overpainting serves as a counterpoint to the stillness of these underlying images, thus asserting the living presence of the artist and a symbolic rail against time. In the triptych I too: in Arcadia: have lived, 2000, we see a wistful snapshot of three men relaxing in the country. The sense of nostalgia is heightened by the title, though the awareness is ever-present that these figures, like the moment they enjoy, are now gone. In Incident at Huppy, 2000-2002, a burning truck is isolated in the top right-hand corner of a canvas which is otherwise painted out; like a vivid image etched upon the mind when all surrounding detail has long since been forgotten. With Lancastria II, 1999-2000, a shipwreck lies abandoned to the vagaries of a deserted ocean like a decrepit monument to a latter-day Ozymandias.

This sense of the temporal is carried over into O'Donoghue's more painterly pieces. Even when the work is completely abstract, such as in Residue, 1992, his canvases have a dark organic quality which reflect O'Donoghue's esoteric ruminations upon the physical. The differing surface qualities within the paintings seem to repel and draw in the observer at the same time. A tension is created reflecting the observer's own denial of, yet cyclical surrender to her/his own finite nature. In Course of the Diver 1, 2002, a male figure lies buffeted within the murky depths, adrift to the ultimate direction of his fate. In a thematic extension of this, ancient burial rites seem to be enacted in Tomb of the Diver - fourth state, 2002, wherein a large painting, in which a male figure is suspended upside-down, is mounted on a Perspex box which appears to contain the touching detritus of his earthly existence.

O'Donoghue's pieces seem to be instilled with a sense of the transient. However, his paintings never descend into a nihilistic statement concerning the inevitability of death. It is no surprise to learn that O'Donoghue is a great admirer of Italian painting from the Gothic period to the Baroque. O'Donoghue's work is occasionally reminiscent of the Baroque in its scale and willingness to engage with archetypal, spiritual themes, such as his series of paintings dealing with the Passion of Christ. This willingness displays a hopeful, if uncertain, ongoing engagement with the metaphysical possibilities which stretch beyond the borders of our ephemeral reality. With his reflections upon the flimsy materiality of the physical and the mercurial nature of memory, O'Donoghue succeeds in rewriting the spiritual, vanitas symbolism of earlier painting traditions and creating an achingly personal, existential statement that is quintessentially modern.

Richard Dwyer is an artist and recent graduate from the MA in Media Studies at the University of Ulster.

Hughie O'Donoghue: Ten Years; Paintings, Memory and the Human form: selected works 1992-2002, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, September /October 2002

Article reproduced from CIRCA 102, Winter 2002, pp. 88-89.

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