Painting here is thriving. Aidan Dunne picks out some names and trends.

Eithne Jordan: Roadside house II , 2004, oil on linen, 190 x 240 cm; courtesy Rubicon Gallery

Several recent magazine advertisements for plasma flat-screen televisions are designed in a way that casts light on the situation of painting in a digitised technological culture. Sony's ad for its WEGA engine system shows the wall-mounted screen illuminated with an image of flowers. The screen of the Hitachi Platara Plasma TV is blank and dark. It too is wall-mounted, in a living room, in a position one would expect to see occupied by a painting. "Remember when people used to hide their TV in a cabinet?" reads the caption. More provocatively, the Sony ad reads: "This is not a TV. It's a new way of seeing. It's a movie, photo album, a spreadsheet, all in pin-sharp widescreen…" It too occupies the place traditionally reserved for painting on the living room wall.

These plasma screens, and their integration with the whole gamut of digital imaging, may well signify another fundamental shift in our evolving relationship with images. And the presentation of the ads seems to indicate the way painting is being further nudged aside, consigned to irrelevance by imaging technology, echoing yet again Paul Delaroche's original pronouncement on the death of painting, after he had witnessed the photographic process in action in 1839. Flat-screen televisions, portable DVD players, digital cameras and camcorders, mobile-phone cameras, digital printers: the entire paraphernalia of contemporary image technology is characterised by both diversity and convergence. A plethora of devices reflects the universality of the image and its infinite communicability and, incidentally, confirms the extraordinary power of the image.

Darren Murray: Alpine landscape , 2001, oil on canvas, 152 x 213 cm; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

There is an obvious issue relating to the position of painting here, given the persistence of the popular assumption that painting is primarily a means of making representational images and that the superior efficacy of photography in that regard must eclipse it. That it is, in effect, an outmoded technology. By this reading, the various initiatives in painting in the late nineteenth and into the mid-twentieth centuries were attempts to renegotiate painting's position in relation to the representational image. But in his book Secret Knowledge , David Hockney argues plausibly that, historically, painters are technologically promiscuous and have used whatever optical and mechanical aids they had access to. The co-option of painting into the progressively self-defining straitjacket of Greenbergian High Modernism, which at a parodic extreme demands the absolute priority of autonomous, formal qualities, was a theoretical construct rather than an inevitable consequence of painting's historically diminished role. Though as it happens the idea of diminution features large in various strands of contemporary painting. But specifically in relation to photography, certainly on a practical level painters have pursued a lively dialogue with the photographic image from the word go. Gerhard Richter's appropriation of it, a widely imitated trope still routinely employed in various ways in contemporary painting, which may be the most celebrated instance of this sometimes combative dialogue, is but one among numerous approaches.

A la Benjamin's 'aura', Richter is a pre-eminent example of a painter who argues the fallacy of equating the painting with the picture. The Mona Lisa on your living room wall, even with the benefit of Sony's "intelligent picture enhancement" is not the Mona Lisa . And it's undeniable that a significant part of the appeal of painting for practitioners is what Richter terms its reality, it's inherent, material reality as opposed to the verisimilitude of the photographic image. That reality is, likewise, anathema to some, who view the gross physical manipulation of a material medium involved in painting as inevitably anachronistic and irrelevant. The ferocity of the ideological opposition of a notably outspoken opponent of painting and extreme Duchampian, Joseph Kosuth, is disconcerting, though open and honest rather than so often seems to be the case on the part of others, covert.

Mark O'Kelly: Audience , 2002, oil on linen, 78 x 119 cm; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

So the contemporary painter might well have to deal with – or choose to ignore – image overload, and with the seductive allure of new media, with ideological opposition, with the various consequences of postmodernity, including the discrediting of such traditional criteria as style and aesthetics. In spite of all this, painting in Ireland is not only widely practised, it is extremely healthy, reflective of a diversity of informed approaches, critically engaged with the demands and limitations of the medium, and with the nature of representation and representational strategies in contemporary culture. That is to say, a painter can work within a realist mode, aware of its historical antecedents and the implicit assumptions it entails, which is altogether different from ironic quotation. Perhaps the least interesting postmodern option is the ironic rehearsal of the history of painting as a catalogue of moribund styles, but that is rare. Usually a high level of critical acumen is involved in the evocation of style.

Even more insidious is the treatment of 'painting' itself as a signifier to be employed and discarded at will, rather than as an area demanding sustained engagement. And although there is a tendency to speak of painting as a homogeneous entity, the fact is that painters do not, by nature, make up one church, however broad. A painter pursuing one mode of working might instinctively recoil from something produced by someone pursuing another. At the same time, there is always the tendency to corral painters into precise and discrete categories which do not adequately reflect the breadth and commonality of their concerns. As happened widely throughout Europe, in the first half of the twentieth century, modernist ideas filtered through to Ireland, from the centre to the periphery, in weakened form. Now the traffic is more likely to be close to instantaneous and undiluted.

Seán Shanahan: Sea , 2002, oil on MDF, 50 x 80 x 3 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

In painting as in other media, postmodern practice is characterised by certain strategies, including appropriation, parody, irony, a preoccupation with repetition, with sameness and difference, with failure and limitations, nature / culture, with issues of identity, and references to forms of popular narrative. Absence usually wins out over presence, fragmentation over unity, contingency over design. In painting particularly, spatial concerns feature large and many problems are approached in terms of spatial frameworks of one kind or another. The ideas of limitation and diminution stem not from painting itself but from the wider sphere of cultural endeavour.

By virtue of his international stature and provocative stance, Sean Scully is an assertive presence in contemporary painting. He has been at pains to identify himself with Ireland. There is an elegiac quality to what might be described as his revisionist, almost late-modernist style, based on the grid but allowing the mediation of a fallible, human touch and atmospheric colour and tonality. The argument his work depends on is that a coherent, stringently policed formal language, passionately employed, is equal to the density and texture, to the complexity of the world. From a complementary position, Hughie O'Donoghue, again a painter who is in a sense electively Irish, makes work that is on one level a protracted argument for the restoration of the human subject, with excavation, archaeology, memory, reconstruction used at various times as metaphors. Both Scully and O'Donoghue feel the need to work on a very large scale, something rare in Irish painting. Both adopt essentially nonmodernist positions that are nonetheless antipathetic to aspects of postmodernity.

It's possible to identify groups of Irish painters whose general concerns can be aligned with those of either Scully or O'Donoghue, which is not to suggest other levels of affiliation that might well be disavowed. Rather, one can say that certain artists are working in areas where presuppositions similar to the ideas referred to above can be seen as being particularly relevant. Clearly Seán Shanahan adheres to a rigorously precise formal language, for example, and he too implicates a formalist aesthetic in what might be termed the messiness of the world rather than insulating it with claims of autonomy. In their different ways the same could be said of Charles Tyrrell, Richard Gorman and Felim Egan, all of whom have produced many series of exceptional, closely argued paintings. There are others as well operating in this area – Samuel Walsh, Bridget Flannery and Marie Hanlon come to mind. All stop short of formalism per se, and some painters, such as Willie McKeown, are especially wary of being caught seeking shelter under the formalist umbrella.

Push the emphasis further onto process and you will arrive at the work of Paul Doran, an exceptionally uncompromising painter, perhaps an affiliate of Jason Martin or Zebedee Jones, who tests the limits of the medium's physicality. Working in a tighter vein, Cian Donnelly makes stratified sandwiches of pure pigment. Makiko Nakamura's paintings use emergent inflections in a uniform grid pattern to reveal the passing of lived time and the working of chance. Fergus Martin explores serial patterns with reference to uniformity and repetition in urban life. Alan Keane's paintings inventively exploit chance. Fergus Feehily generates grids and networks that refer to systems of all kinds, organic and synthetic. Paul Mosse pursues ritualistic, arbitrary processes to generate remarkable pictorial-sculptural systems. And so on.

On the O'Donoghue side of the equation, if ever an artist seemed intent on embodying presence in his work it is Nick Miller, whose drawings and paintings hinge on the lived, attentive encounter with the subject, whether human or landscape, in images predicated on time and concentration. Again there are many related painters. Time is also important in Bernadette Kiely's work, which combines ideas of habitude and ephemerality in incandescent evocations of an epiphanic, momentary now. Sonia Shiel's textural paintings, with their equivocal balance of good and bad, nice and nasty, bristle with a sense of difficult presence. Gwen O'Dowd addresses landscape forms that frame absence. And Mary Lohan's polyptych compositions refer to shoreline landscapes, invite references to romanticism but are resolutely non-romantic.

A few year's ago the RHA hosted an exhibition of work by the Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser. Previously the Douglas Hyde had featured Luc Tuymans, who acknowledges de Keyser as an influence. Both have featured in major shows in London this year. What they have is common is an oblique, unpredictable representational strategy, and a curiously compelling acceptance of the diminution of such concepts as veracity, authenticity and presence in relation to the image. There is an exhausted, residual quality to the work of both, a kind of ennui. Yet there are ambitious claims implicit in their very acceptance of diminished possibilities, of deferrals of meaning, fragmentation, traces and absences.

Sionia Shiel: Coal flower , oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm; courtesy Cross Gallery

There is a quality of yearning, rather than irony, in their painting, but it's related not so much to a nostalgia for the certainties of an all-encompassing modernism as a stubborn fidelity to a mindset that still looks for points of reference in realms of experience that are denied authenticity. Like lapsed Catholics, in a sense, they miss the condition of believing. Paul Nugent has explicitly referred to this mindset in his paintings, which play on the idea of the spiritual in modernist abstraction and Catholic theology alike. The work of de Keyser and Tuymans is significant as much for the philosophical position it exemplifies as for its visual style. A comparable sense of distance, of attenuation, is one of the dominant notes in much Irish painting even if, as in the work of Mark Swords, for example, a greater degree of detachment and levity, and hence rather more room for manoeuvre, are evident. One could cite Merlin James and Neal Tait as relevant here.

The feeling of a fading, diminished world attends Pat Harris' studies of plant and landscape subjects. As with Swords, space in Sarah Durcan's paintings is not the familiar, straightforward pictorial space we are used to. Rather it's a shifting field capable of framing different kinds of representation. As such, it allows considerable space for speculation, but everything is imbued with that spectral, distanced quality. Mark Joyce, too, seems interested in representational strategies, open-endedly making and unmaking visual languages. A certain playfulness which is another aspect of this sort of painting is also characteristic of Ronnie Hughes' work, which could almost be described as the equivalent of building model universes in the way he generates a sense of thought experiments. Patrick Michael Fitzgerald's painting has a similarly speculative quality. There is a feeling in Sinéad Aldridge's work that she allows things to unfold into a pliable pictorial space, in a manner akin to Fiona Rae. Liz Magill seeks to maintain a workable space in the ambiguous zone between workaday materials – paint, drips, glitter etc – and the seductive evocation of romantic landscape.

Narrative spaces and structures, particularly cinematic ones, feature in different forms in work by several painters. Katy Simpson makes story-board-like sequences of oblique, fragmentary representational paintings charged with hints of psychological narrative, though a specific narrative is never spelled out. Colin Martin, Oliver Comerford and Madeleine Moore also draw on elements of cinematic narrative, often using empty vistas as indicators of emotional life. More recently, Philippa Sutherland has strikingly explored similar possibilities. Using a comicbook vernacular, Paul Regan plays with the workings of popular mythology.

Such work can be viewed as blending with that of another group of painters who adopt critical approaches to languages of representation. Their work embraces disparate references and ideas. They include Margaret Corcoran, who treats pictorial style as embodying ways of seeing that are culturally and historically framed. One could say the same of Michael Canning, who is wistfully absorbed by the grand projects and, perhaps, failures of Western culture. Similarly, Blaise Drummond seems to chronicle the eclipse of nature by culture. Darren Murray looks analytically at the way the visible world is structured by commodification. Philip Moss uses ideas of pattern and sameness in questioning the mechanics of pictorial illusion. Mark O'Kelly uses comparable ideas with slightly different aims. Stephen McKenna revisits genres with a renewel of classical tradition in mind.

Martin Gale has built up a substantial body of work in a vein of heightened, hard-edged realism. It interweaves two complementary threads: the psychological, emotional lives of its subjects and the factual reality of life in rural Ireland. By contrast, Dermot Seymour uses as isolated motifs images of farm animals. Gale's painting can be linked to that of a number of younger artists, notably Blaise Smith, who also makes factual views of a recognisable rural Ireland, not so much de-romanticised as never invested with romanticism. Smith is one of the best of a number of painters, including Maeve McCarthy and David Browne, who adhere to an intense mode of realist painting. Keith Wilson's minute investigation of the textures of the land are an example of another kind of realism, leaning towards abstraction, dealing with the human role in the landscape in terms of absence. The further you get from Gale's exceptionally hard-nosed view of things, the more compromised and pictorial the treatment tends to become. Yet a painter like David Quinn can imbue potentially saccharine material with a convincing lyricism.

One of the most striking things about current Irish paintings is the way the long-term trajectory of an artist's work gradually becomes apparent. Gale is a case in point. Although he may well have seemed to be a marginal figure at a certain stage of his career, his achievement is considerable. Eithne Jordan, who established herself during the Neo-Expressionist phase in the 1980s, has developed in unpredictable and rewarding directions. The carefully subdued, impoverished quality of her work over the last decade or so relates it not only to some of the strategies already discussed, but also, in the longer view, to aspects of Irish painting extending back to the 1950s.

While it seemed, in the late 1990s, that painting might wither completely in the context of third-level art education, the exceptional quality of the work that has emerged since now makes that possibility extremely unlikely. Merlin James argues that more attention should be paid to painting per painting, and less to painting as an endangered species. Perhaps we are gradually coming around to that state of affairs.

Aidan Dunne

Article reproduced from CIRCA 109, Autumn 2004, pp. 28-32.

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