C105 Review

Limerick: Padraig Cunningham at Belltable

Padraig Cunningham: Soften; courtesy Belltable Art Centre

Inside Out is an exploration by Dublin-based painter Padraig Cunningham involving creating environments which are ambiguous in their function and domain. The exhibition, opened in some style by Tom Lawlor, photographer and broadcaster, is the Stoneybatter Studio resident's first solo exhibition since his Model Arts and Niland Gallery show back in 2001. It is minimal in format - there are only five works on display - and also in its subject matter. The images focus on a very refined visual repertory. The imagery in four of the works is refined to the stage where one single light source, a different type of light in each painting, becomes the main subject matter of the work. The light is at its most intense somewhere off centre, from where it fades out toward the edges of the work, to be framed by darkness. The work could be looked at as a metaphor for the process of creation itself - let there be light - and Cunningham's painting process is aptly suited to this theme. The artist's sfumato technique involves a painstaking glazing process, with thin glaze after thin glaze built up to achieve a gently subdued, abstract pictorialism.

The artist states, in the gallery handout, that he works "with his medium in a reduced way to suggest interior spaces whose meaning is left open with the viewer to create their own narrative." In Turning, the only piece in the show of a portrait/vertical format, Cunningham has created an image which glows and shimmers with a red-and-orange haze that has a transcendental quality. It is a glow that one would associate with Renaissance altar pieces. It is a religious image without the object; what remains is its aura, its afterglow. And for me the aura best describes the presences that are to be found in Cunningham's more refined works. In The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction Walter Benjamin¹ writes about the aura of the work of art being linked with and formed in the creative process itself. "...the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual."²

Cunningham's pictorialism crystallises this process of creation in the realm of the ritual. They are works in which the image is an embodiment of the method of process. They visually illustrate this process: the formation of the aura.

For me, Cunningham's most visually successful piece, Soften, is also the artist's least refined image. The space which the artist has created (suggested) within the picture is a space that is different from what is perceived to exist in the other four works. In its ambiguous spatial structures exist not just one main element but a number of elements, a predominant black area and three hazy glowing ochre areas. The darkness, which acts as a backdrop, a framing device in the other works, is here very much an essential part of the environment. It seems to be hiding, covering off areas of the picture. It is an expansive space; the dark and glowing areas bleed off the picture plane; there is no centre. The work's beginning and ending remain ambiguous. It encroaches the space of the viewer and, because of its large scale, it is effective as a poetic space of the mind which the viewer can engage with and explore.

Paul Aherne is an artist based in Contact Studios, Limerick.

¹Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Art in Theory 1900-1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell, 1992, pp. 512-520
²ibid., p. 514

Padraig Cunningham: Inside Out, Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick

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