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C110 review
Limerick: Jack Donovan
/ Tom Fitzgerald at Limerick City Gallery of Art
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| Jack Donovan: After the Ball, 1980,
oil on board, 66 x 56 cm; courtesy Limerick City Gallery of
Art |
A
woman walks into a pub and asks the barman for a double entendre.
So he gives her one.1
In the spirit of the Carry on movies,
Jack Donovan's retrospective at the Limerick City Gallery of Art
seems to revel in a peculiarly British brand of bawdy humour born
of vaudeville and the music hall. And, like the Carry on
movies, his work remains naughty but never prurient, suggestive,
but never obscene. However, wandering around the upstairs galleries
with several dozen goggle-eyed gazes upon one, it is advisable
to be ever so slightly on guard lest one of the girls lean out
of her canvas and pinch your backside or smack a wet kiss on your
cheek...
Outrageously, The Magician, mid-trick,
can't resist a peep at his bare-bottomed assistant and even the
Biblical episodes are irreverently crowded with gratuitous nudity.
In The Annunciation the news of sacred appointment is delivered
to a surprised (and naked) virgin and The temptation of Saint
Anthony, peopled with ripe, pink, fleshy women, is far from
subtle. Despite such mocking indulgences, one gets the sense that,
rather than engaging in any serious political or religious commentary
Donovan is, primarily, having a lark - the church and her parables
serving as a ready target for him to strip and boyishly parody.
Blushes and giggles aside, Donovan demonstrates
mastery of his medium and focused attention to pictorial balance.
Ample evidence of his formal painterly concerns can be traced
through the three distinct phases of his production represented
in this retrospective.
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| Tom Fitzgerald: The Celtic Tiger
expires having eaten Eircom shareholders, 2003, mixed
media on drawing paper, 37 x 29 cm; courtesy Limerick City
Gallery of Art |
Sequestered in the East gallery, a small number
of portrait studies from the late 1970s, notably that of Mary
Nagle and the sensitive study of a young, blonde, thoughtful lad
in Portrait of Desmond O'Grady, show off his technical
skill and appreciation of the academic tradition.
Later, with a maturing of the collage techniques
he discovered in the 1960s, Donovan's work gallops away from direct
observational studies of the figure. Like a deranged reconstructive
surgeon, he takes bodies apart and fashions new ones from the
jigsawed pieces, swapping magazine heads, fastening out-sized
grins to painted faces and adding his signature saucer-eyes. A
fine example of this mixing and mismatching, the 1978 oil-and-collage
work After Velázquez (bearing uncanny resemblance
to a character from a Terry Gilliam Python animation) pays
a quirky tribute to the master painter, while his later paintings
of cyclopic clowns (images conjured from his vaguely haunting
childhood memories of Duffy's circus) also acknowledge his debts
to Picasso and Cubism.
The remainder of the exhibition follows Donovan's
emergence from the greys and browns of the early collage period
in an unexpected riot of colour, and offers the viewer an opportunity
to enjoy his most recent works, grotesque carnivals on canvas
celebrating the life of the human animal.
After the party that is a trip to Donovan's
show, a visit to Tom Fitzgerald's exhibition, The Ministry
of Dust: Drawings, Sculpture and Installations, running
concurrently in the downstairs galleries, offers the entertained,
but exhausted viewer quiet respite. In contrast with the antics
upstairs, Fitzgerald cultivates an atmosphere of calm: his rooms
silent, but for the comforting sense of things ticking over.
Fitzgerald's sculptures behave as tools for
the imagination, and the unmissable Boat used in voyage from
A to B (a large plaster-of-Paris shell filled with wool, supported
on an orthopaedic-looking chassis), which greets the viewer upon
entering the gallery, certainly excites speculation. Laden with
its cargo of fleece, does it make some nodding reference to Jason's
epic travels? Or was this vessel sky-bound, collecting a cartload
of cloud along its passage?
Similarly, in his installation The absent
philosopher (a wrapped chair and ladder resting on
a spot-lit chequerboard floor, dimly illuminated in the rear by
blue neon numbers), one could be forgiven for thinking that a
rogue character from a Beckett play might stray across this vacant
stage-set, briefly contemplate his condition, consider using the
heavily bandaged ladder and, for various inexplicable reasons,
abandon the plan.
Complementing the sculptural works, Fitzgerald's
sequences of delicately executed drawings with cryptic titles
such as Departure of Archimedes and The seekers after
truth find ladder in the wilderness read like leaves from
a philosopher's comicbook. Peppered with references to ancient
Greek schools of thought, art-historical moments and incisive
criticisms of both contemporary national and international political
events, these works, underscored with a gentle, erudite humour,
seem to direct their point more exactly than the allusive sculptural
pieces.
While something about this body of work feels
fraught with an unidentified anxiety, leaving this viewer sometimes
perplexed, it is nonetheless a sincere attempt to elucidate some
of the innumerable puzzles of human existence and marks an interesting
chapter in the artist's career.
Ciara Finnegan is an artist based
in Limerick.
1Quoted
in a Carry on review, Sunday Times, August 1998.
Jack Donovan: Retrospective Paintings
1959-2004; Tom Fitzgerald: The Ministry of Dust:
Drawings, Sculpture and Installations, Limerick City Gallery
of Art, September / October 2004
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Is Jack Donovan still painting?
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